"Manual Transmission Could Be Forced Into Retirement"

[North7]

why would you want to disengage the clutch when it’s far better to cut throttle and keep the car in gear?

The engine will buck as it slows if left in gear, especially higher gears, try it out where no one is around to give it a try.

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[BlazinGTO]

If you just slam on your brakes in a panic stop in any vehicle with a manual transmission and don’t do anything with the clutch pedal, the car will stop just fine, but the engine will stall. No big deal

If you don't automatically press in the clutch during an emergency stop then you screwed up. If someone drives one enough, it will happen without thinking during an emergency.

Besides, having it stall during an emergency stop is a very big deal. You would lose braking power and it will be hard to steer. Not to mention you may have to very quickly move your vehicle after stopping. Not every quick stop is in a straight line.

 

[918v]

The engine will buck as it slows if left in gear, especially higher gears, try it out where no one is around to give it a try.

its called engine braking

 

[TXRancher]

I don't think anyone will say new safety features make a car less safe but I dare you to day that driver aids don't make more distracted drivers and that is a real problem on the road. Treat distracted drivers like drunk drivers and we can get somewhere.

 

[campbebc]

its called engine braking

Slam on your brakes in 6th gear to go 70mph down to 10mph, your car's transmission will not be pleased going down to 10mph in 6th and will "buck" as @North7 stated. At a certain point, you'd need clutch disengagement.

 

[Nickp]

100 years from now our great great great grandkids will look at the enormous loss of life from car accidents in the 20th and 21st century similarly to how we look at civil war amputations and child fatality rates prior to the advent of modern medicine. All of these features are just helping us get closer to getting our transportation deaths down to a significantly lower level, and it’s not just about deaths either. My best friend’s back is messed up from being rear ended when she was 16, and my dad’s back from being hit by a pickup truck when the driver fell asleep on the highway in the late 80’s. As a 25 year old I have personally lost 3 friends in car accidents. A future where my examples become an extreme rarity rather than something that everyone is affected by or knows someone who is should be something we strive for.

 

[Tonka Bronka]

Agreed

There just wont be enough demand to engineer safety systems into both an automatic and a manual. the R&D just wont make any sense, maybe not initially but the death of the manual is 100% going to be because of demand, not regulation.

I obviously don’t know much about Corvettes due to the fact that I made a comment about factory delivery and was promptly schooled, but I do know that you can’t get a manual Corvette now.........and the taillights suck..........but other than that, it’s pretty nice.

 

[scubasteve]

I agree with what you're saying. But why couldn't the auto makers add safety features to the manuals, rather than get rid of them completely? Also, i never said getting rid of manuals "is more dangerous".... where did you get that from?

The implication you had was that Manuals reduce distracted driving as you are more focused on driving the vehicle. Thus safer than an automatic assuming similarly safety equipped automatic vehicle. While I don't necessarily disagree in that scenario, the reality is there are so few instances where that is the case.

The reality is yes, automakers can go through the extra programming, the extra engineering, the extra lockouts to have similar safety features in a manual, such as BMW with their some of their vehicles. But that is an expensive course of action for such a small amount of your customer base. Sure BMW doesn't mind doing it on a 100K car, and even Ford doing it for for a $60K Bronco makes sense. But Honda isn't going to do that with their Civic if they expect to keep it under $30K and compete with other brands which is why manuals are being slowly phased out.

Its just a point of diminishing returns. Its likely a reason why there isn't a manual option for the 2.7L in the Bronco. Ford doesn't want to have engineer a whole other transmission set-up for that in a new vehicle when they already have a 2.3L manual option. All to please what probably amounts to be what, 5K maybe 15K Broncos in MY21 when they selling literally hundreds of thousands of other automatic vehicles.

Like I said, manual vehicles have their niche place in the world and enthusiasts will want them. But the market has bared out (as well as cheaper engineering and programming practices) that automatics are favored by consumers as they're easier to drive, faster, more reliable, more efficient and generally better than the manual counterpart in most circumstances.

Its just cheaper and easier to integrate automated safety features into an already automated portion of the vehicle (transmission) than to try an integrate it into an analog one. Unless the customer demand or profit margin is high (which is on such a small fractional portion of the market share) it just ain't worth it.

 

[918v]

Slam on your brakes in 6th gear to go 70mph down to 10mph, your car's transmission will not be pleased going down to 10mph in 6th and will "buck" as @North7 stated. At a certain point, you'd need clutch disengagement.

not if the driver is awake

 

[Nickp]

Slam on your brakes in 6th gear to go 70mph down to 10mph, your car's transmission will not be pleased going down to 10mph in 6th and will "buck" as @North7 stated. At a certain point, you'd need clutch disengagement.

If the situation is this horrific then the alternative is probably an extremely severe crash. I’ll take a blown transmission in someone else’s car over getting rear ended by someone literally incapacitated at the wheel.

 

[WhoaNelly]

Just to clarify, I never said the safety features lead to less safety. Im just saying getting rid of manual transmissions to accomplish safety doesn't mean it will be safer. As there have been studies showing manuals lead to less distracted driving. All im trying to say...

While the idea of manuals requiring more attention is well taken, fewer and fewer people are buying them. So the idea of roads getting safer due to manuals is completely moot. How about we just face the facts that automatics and distracted driving are here to stay due to a proliferation of idiots on the road, and we need stuff like auto-emergency braking, blind spot thingy, lane thingy to keep us safer?
FYI, I also ride motorcycles and live in CA. I use the lane-filtering law whenever I can to make sure I don't leave myself exposed to being rear-ended by an idiot who just needed to get that last "lol OMG" text out. But occasionally there isn't enough room to filter, and I'd rather a car brake itself than turn into a meat-metal sandwich.

 

[RoLyMa27]

Specifically referring to automatic braking and adaptive cruise control in the article. I do not see those as necessary, nor helpful. To each as their own..

If people would just put the damn phone down and drive. All of those nannies are saving us from ourselves!

 

[Rick Astley]

Humans have always sought means to make life easier.

Automatic take rate is massive because there is no earnest effort in this country to ensure driver quality, just driver quantity. Everyone with a pulse is effective deemed competent to operate machinery that can kill your entire family and an automatic transmission keeps the barrier to entry as low as possible. If car theft rates are any indication as to the barrier-to-entry, when 1 generation into the pussification of drivers fleetwide adoption of automatics you now have car thieves who can't drive a manual and there's no market for them.

This may be a rant, but I also believe automatic transmissions to be a material contributor to gridlock traffic. From enabling distractions, and removing compression braking, to forcing the constant use of brakes (and therefore brake lights) and the slow erosion of driving comprehension (such as understanding gearing and your current speed/velocity for a given situation), automatic transmissions have had the unintended consequence of forcing the inchworm effect of gas/brake/gas/brake/gas/brake because the automatic transmission prevents the driver from controlling that via simply letting off the gas or maintaining a constant low speed.

FWIW: after owning an automatic transmission equipped car as a daily driver for the first time in my life, the manual transmission was a deal-breaker for my next purchase and in shopping all bakers-dozen of manual transmission equipped cars available to me today, Bronco came out the winner (M3 was close, but they aren't fast enough to be a proper sports car and I don't want a car that expensive).

 

[RoLyMa27]

100 years from now our great great great grandkids will look at the enormous loss of life from car accidents in the 20th and 21st century similarly to how we look at civil war amputations and child fatality rates prior to the advent of modern medicine. All of these features are just helping us get closer to getting our transportation deaths down to a significantly lower level, and it’s not just about deaths either. My best friend’s back is messed up from being rear ended when she was 16, and my dad’s back from being hit by a pickup truck when the driver fell asleep on the highway in the late 80’s. As a 25 year old I have personally lost 3 friends in car accidents. A future where my examples become an extreme rarity rather than something that everyone is affected by or knows someone who is should be something we strive for.

Nick, at what point will we be idiot proof? I too have lost people to automobile accidents. It sucks! But do we outlaw ladders? Guns, definitely get rid of guns. All those sugary sodas...gone, too much diabetes! Fatty foods, gone, too many heart attacks!--(already doing that) Where does it end? One of the main reasons cars are so expensive now is due to all the "tech" being built in! I don't have any hard answers either. l just believe in our mad rush to make EVERYTHING safe, and create this elusive utopia, we are going to slowly but surely lose what makes this country great...our Freedoms! The man knows everything we say, even in the privacy of our own homes now! Every text, call, email, all of it is scanned now in the name of safety. Sorry man, not attacking, just ranting!

 

[RoLyMa27]

Have you ever lived in another Democratic 1st or 2nd world country? Pretty darn free. And also pretty damn safe for you and your entire family.

There is a massively stronger sense of community and social/moral responsibility in other countries, that is without doubt. When you boil down "freedom" across democratic 1st and 2nd world countries, the main freedom America has over any other developed nation is pretty much guns and the ability to kill each other with a fairly wide scope of legal acceptability.

One could easily argue that our society is so violent and broken that having around 1% of the countries population in prison is evidence enough that we aren't free. And that our concept of social morality and accountability is so skewed that we're drastically less "free" than other nations.

Anyway, now to make this post on cars and automatic transmissions: All this was caused by automatic transmissions! (or something like that)

I only have one question Rick..If what you say is true, Why are so many people willing to die to get here? When, quite literally, no other country, to my knowledge, has or is having the immigration problems we have.

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