Why a Stick and Not an Automatic?

You know, for as long as I have been driving cars, there is one thing I want more than most any other feature -- a stick, a manual transmission. Now I have been mocked, derided, scoffed at and generally given short shrift for being so enamored with manual transmissions.

I can recall a girl friend from many years ago when I was still young and had more hair. She said "all you guys who drive sports cars with a stick, you just think it's your (dear reader, choose any euphemism you can think of for the male sexual member)!" But although I vociferously protested, and gesticulated like an Italian male at a brothel, she utterly insisted there was a phallic connection of some kind.

Well, I had to correct her. How many real car guys have grabbed their own member from south of the mason-zipper line thinking they were shifting a car? I bet it's millions across the globe. And possibly billions. Somewhere in deep space there are male aliens who drive their spaceships with manual transmissions who just love to shift a transmission for the joy of it. But whether you are from Seti-Alpha 6 or earth, if you are a car guy, you want a manual because shifting feels good. 

It's not just about control (but oh so much of it really is), it's also about being connected to machinery and enjoying the art of getting the shift right. Not to mention the pleasure any guy with a mechanical bone in his body feels when a well designed gear shift and series of cogs and gears just snicks into place from one gear to the next. It's so sweet, it makes you want to shift for the sake of shifting. It puts a massive grin on your face, it's legal, and it's good for the economy, stupid.

Now I know there are robotized manuals out there, and they work far better, faster and more efficiently than I could ever shift, even if I were on some kind of driver's steroid and had the feel of a safe cracker. It's a machine, it's meant to be better than a human in executing those tasks. And when the throttle blips and matches the revs on the downshift better than I ever could, well, engineers and test drivers have spent untold millions perfecting that. Good for them.

As for automatics, they are smooth, they are efficient, they sophisticated and come with more gears than you can poke a stick at nowadays. But they are passionless pieces of perfection, placed there to puncture your perfectly good pleasure drive.

I would happily drive an '86 Celica or a Honda CRX or even the new Golf's 6 speed manual, and give up some technology and speed and even some mileage just to have a manual. 

 Long live the stick! May we shift in peace!