I grew up learning to drive a manual transmission car. Awesome. I loved the feeling of driving and shifting gears up the hilly, mountainous, twisty horrible roads in Jamaica. Exhilarating!
But cars got better. I got older, and now automatic transmissions are so much more efficient than manual transmissions * for ordinary people *.
We're not talking about people who love driving here. We are talking about people who drive an ordinary car. People who just want to commute and relax. We are not talking about Porsche or Konignsegg's (sp) latest car with a manual transmission.
These days I'm in a taxi in Thailand almost every day, and half of the drivers use a manual transmission and the other half use an automatic transmission. I think the reason is that cars with manual transmissions are older and cheaper.
But at the same time, the driving experience in those taxis with the manual transmission is horrible. Herky-jerky, and most of the drivers don't even know how to use the manual correctly.
I drove a manual for about 20 years and I still really enjoy them, but there is one thing that made me happily leave them behind: stop-and-go traffic. Not having to clutch constantly when driving in the city is a big enough win that I'm willing to give up the fun of a manual for it. But I do sometimes miss having a stick on a windy mountain road.
I currently use a (automatic) borrowed car from the shop while my (manual) car is being repaired. I mostly do city-driving.
One of the biggest issues with the automatic is stop-and-go traffic. It's absolutely trash at accelerating smoothly but fast, and I have no choice but to either go very slowly forward to not make it janky, or really aggressive acceleration. With a manual car, smooth-but-fast acceleration is easy to achieve, but with this (Audi Q3) borrow car, it seems short of impossible to achieve.
More pet-peeves of automatic VS manual I'm experiencing are outlined here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32591426 but smooth city driving is probably what I miss the most currently, as that is mostly how I spend my driving.
The latest subaru forester is absolutely insane when it comes to how much control you have over acceleration. I can creep forward at agonizingly slow speeds without riding the brake, stomp it for mostly instant torque, and everything in between. It's way smoother than any manual, automatic 6-spd, or DSG I've ever driven.
Oh and you can downshift to engine brake and the Sport model has flappy paddles to boot.
There are still a lot of more-or-less-shit automatics being manufactured. Even if they collectively has gotten quite a bit better over the years.
The six-speed automatic in my KIA for example, is from the past three years and it is not entirely great. It is perfectly fine 98% of the time, but those last two percent...
* Shifting speed is highly unpredictable on kick-down
* In certain temperatures it will slam the shift from first to second even when taking of very softly
* It will randomly decide to stay in a needlessly low gear on long, gentle inclines, even though there is plenty of power in higher gears if you force an up-shift in manual mode
* On low-speed sharp inclines (like my own residental street) it desperately stays in second gear to the point of almost stalling the engine, before does a brutal panic-downshift to first gear
But in standard highway driving or city-stop-and-go it is really nice.
I'm not sure what country you are in. In the US, I believe the Q3 still always comes with a torque-converter automatic. A quick search seems to show lots of people on enthusiast boards complaining about the shift programming on the current generation. But, also lots of contradictory reports. It makes me think it is a UX issue where the programming works for some operators' "pedal language" and not others.
We have an older generation Q3, which replaced a slightly smaller car that had a manual transmission and similar turbo 4-cylinder engine. I was a little bitter about this marital compromise in the very beginning, but learned how the car behaves and have no problems today. I only use the "manual" gear selection for speed control on steep grades. To me, it can provide smoother acceleration than I ever got in 30 years of driving manuals. It shifts quicker and with more continuous power delivery compared to any manual operation I've achieved or witnessed as a passenger. The change is learning to anticipate and speak to the car with the throttle instead of anticipating and speaking with the clutch pedal and stick.
For fleet efficiency reasons, these modern automatics will prefer high gears and also use clutches to lock-out the torque converter and avoid slippage. Combine that with fuel saving coasting modes and you can potentially reach states where a small turbo engine is at low RPM with low boost pressure and a high gearing load. If you want to accelerate right then, all these bad conditions need to be reversed through a kick-down procedure, and you maximize the feeling of a delayed surge in acceleration.
It's not the same transmission as the current generation Q3, but one thing I've noticed is that there is a slight risk of this sort of stuttering/slow take off when braking to a low speed without stopping. If I am at a complete stop with brake pedal depressed, the starts are very predictable. But braking into a turn lane or driveway gets the car into its most hesitant state if I try to accelerate back out of this slow roll.
That is not my experience *at all*. There must be something wrong with that particular transmission.
I love driving manual, but a long stretch of having to commute in stop and go traffic made me switch to automatic, and it has always been a buttery smooth experience for me.
There is nothing worse than the smell of burning clutch in the morning.
Smoothness depends on automatic transmission type.
My hybrid Toyota with CVT is a pleasure to drive in a city. Smooth, no gear changes just linear acceleration. Any other car even those with dual clutch feels inferior at least in city traffic.
In Italy the driving test is on manual transmission and many people use manual.
I trained in Rome, parking on the left side downhill (so backward is uphill), it was tough, but learned a lot of tricks in the process to prevent stalling. You also become very attuned to the clutch
I do love manual transmission, but the purpose is to have fun, not for daily usage.
I’m doubting the person in Italy has a need for ice and snow driving.
Where I am it might snow or ice once a year. However I do own an SUV that has a snow mode. It starts in second to avoid spinning the wheels and will let you manually cycle through the 8 speeds if you want.
The 3 times I can remember there was snow in Rome the city would completely lock, with cars abandoned in the middle of the road (picture post zombie apocalypse kind of thing), so you can't drive even if you want to, because there is no room on the road.
A lot of modern cars have an automatic brake that keeps your car from going downhill in those situations. Some are smoother, some are weirder, but it works.
Generically, that's called a hill holder, and there were pre-electronic implementations. My 1986 Subaru BRAT had one. I can't speak to how it was to drive; it never worked. The hill holder specifically, the rest of the car mostly worked.
I've rented a BMW a few years ago on vacation in Portugal. It had manual transmission and a system to prevent rolling back on hills. Those things are not incompatible.
Automatic transmission is much worse than manual in mountain roads and uphill.
But I always forget that a lot of people have no idea on how to drive uphill with manual transmission.
They're talking about taking off when stopped on a hill. Pressing the clutch and releasing the brake will result in the car rolling backward down the hill until you get enough forward momentum going to take off. Newer drivers freak-out on the rolling backward bit.
I remember an earlier discussion on HN where different people around the world learned different techniques for preventing the rollback. I remember lots of Europeans saying that's what the parking brake is for. Here in the States we're taught to let out the clutch until it starts to bite and then release the brake. You may still roll backward a few inches but that's no big deal.
I actually enjoyed the challenge of that. The problem with stop-and-go driving, especially in LA where I made the transition to automatic, is that it can go on for a very long time. My left leg would get sore. Starting up a hill typically only has to be done once.
People say they hate driving manuals in stop-and-go-traffic and I don't get it - maybe it's because I've been driving them as my daily driver for over 30 years? My left foot and right hand just take care of what needs to be done without my even having to think about it. Essentially I am driving an automatic! :)
By the time I got to that kind of traffic my left foot and right hand were already on automatic. Doesn't feel like a chore because half the time I'm not even aware of what they're doing - they just do it.
I don't even notice it. I would assume you're using a hydraulic clutch? I thought those were pretty much the standard (ha!) since 80's. Maybe I'm just getting a workout without realizing it? I do know whenever I drive my wife's car - which is an automatic because she also hates driving a manual transmission in traffic - my left foot nearly goes through the floorboard before it realizes there's no pedal there! :)
I still get befuddled when parking her car because I never remember to shift into park and I'm wondering why I can't turn the ignition switch to off and pull the key out. Gets me every time!
This was 20-30 years ago. I drove two different manual transmissions in LA, a Volvo 240 and an Infiniti G20. I'm pretty sure the Volvo had a mechanical (non-hydraulic) clutch. Not sure about the G20.
Yeah, a mechanical clutch would be a BEAR!!! All my personal vehicles have always had a hydraulic clutch. They make it so simple your left foot can just do it without you much noticing it.
Rally transmissions at least are very much manual. Along with most other race transmissions. They use dog-ring gearboxes, which are just really beefy synchronizing rings that let you just slam it into gear without decoupling from the engine. The paddles are electric, but they tell some pneumatic system to push a lever forwards or backwards.
F1 might use some decoupling? But I would expect them to work like most other race transmissions, by not decoupling.
There are computers that control the rev-matching, but that's technically on the engine side of things. There are sensors on the gearbox that let the controller know when to add throttle, but it's still very much not the responsibility of the transmission. There are also downshift protection to make sure you don't over-rev the engine, but this is also on the engine side of things, but it does block the signal from the paddle shifters.
This feature is on ordinary cars too (sometimes called 'semi automatics')
I actually have it on my car, there are paddles behind the steering wheel that can shift the gears up and down. It's a bit of a gimmick for ordinary driving as you can just let the car choose the appropriate gear, but I guess if you want to shunt down a few gears quickly on a hill to get some engine braking it can be useful
I use this for people that get easily carsick, it allows me to pull away in 2nd gear rather than first and that means fewer gearshifts and more smooth starting. It's not super good for the clutch but it certainly beats cleaning up...
There’s nothing misleading about it. Shift paddles are pretty standard on cars with automatic gearboxes. The only difference is that outside of sports cars “consumer” gearboxes will usually restrict the range they’ll let you use with semi-automatic shifting and will override that if you redline or bottom out.
It’s completely irrelevant to the discussion at hand: whether the user or the computer initiates the gear change does not change the efficiency of the gearbox.
When manuals are discussed on the internet, it’s the manual clutch which is the central difference, not what’s essentially a firmware feature or lack thereof. That’s what’s mentioned in pretty much every comment other than your nitpicks.
F1 isn’t even about max performance, it’s about trying to maintain an element of driver skill as a factor of outcomes. It’s why they outlawed the Williams continuously variable transmission (CVT). A lot in F1 is done to maintain the suspense/excitement of a race for the TV audience.
> F1 and rally cars haven’t been manual for decades.
In racing, but particularly in F1, you can't leave a single millisecond on the table because the competitors won't. So F1 gearboxes shift in milliseconds which is obviously impossible for a human to do with a clutch pedal. And that is all F1 teams optimize for, speed.
When driving purely for fun (as most street sports cars are used) there is no stopwatch, so it hardly matters if the shift happens in 10 milliseconds or a 1000.
What matters is how much fun it is and that is where a good shifter and a clutch pedal with a nice feel shine.
> What matters is how much fun it is and that is where a good shifter and a clutch pedal with a nice feel shine.
The comment I replied to was talking about efficiency, and my reply was in those terms as well. If what matters to you is the car equivalent of putting your audio cables on pyramids you do you, but this is not “what matters” to what we were talking about. It couldn’t be any further really.
It's basically 'daily driver' versus 'enthusiast' or 'track car' now even for cars in that bracket.
One big advantage in the second hand market is that if you look for an automatic you can be fairly sure that the engine won't have been overrevved. (The engine computer registers this and if you read it out you can see how long and how often it was overrevved, for stick shift cars this isn't unusual at all, on automatics it just doesn't happen.)
Specifically, automatics accounted for around 10 percent of Ford Europe sales volume in 2017. That figure has climbed to over 31 percent in the first month of the 2020 calendar year.
They weren't for about 100 years, but automatics are now mostly better than manuals in terms of performance and economy. Unfortunately, some the the things that make them "better" like 8 gears makes the driving feel worse, with constant shifting. The other big gain is in improved torque conversion.
Automatics traditionally had a single clutch and a viscous coupling to convert smooth the torque between gear shifts. Switching gears was slow and the transmission as a whole was less fuel efficient.
Modern automatic gearboxes have dual clutches and two separate sets of gears for even and odd numbers. You alternate between them as you shift up and down. Shifting is faster and smoother.
(The system isn’t perfect. If you switch to manual selection of gears the transmission computer sometimes guessing wrong — while you’re in 3rd and accelerating it’ll get 4th ready for on the even-numbers clutch, so if you suddenly brake and shift down there is a longer delay while the transmission shifts to 2nd instead.)
That’s not quite how traditional autos worked, they also have sets of clutches and bands, controlled by a complex hydraulic system. Modern automatics are electronically actuated and are basically killing the need for DCTs, with VW Group and Hyundai (and some exotic makers) being the lone holdouts in the U.S. market.
DCTs are still best for that sweet-sweet 0-60 time. The max stall RPMs on a stock torque converted transmission is probably 2300rpms at the most, while Porsche PDK can launch at redline and modulate torque delivery precisely.
I don't know of a car with a torque converted that can hit sixty in under 3.0 seconds, but the Corvette and 911 can both do so with RWD due to the bonkers launches these cars manage.
The BMW M5 has a ZF 8HP and pulls off sub 3s 0-60s in CS trim. The new xDrive M3 comes close. I’m sure there are others. The key obviously is to have a torque converter stall speed that’s in powerband.
Yeah, you're right. I realize that I eluded to it in the subsequent statement, but didn't outright say it, but I meant to say,
> I don't know of a RWD car with a torque converted that can hit sixty in under 3.0 seconds on street tires,
It's insane what the C8 can do with RWD on street tires. Being able to launch at full HP without destroying the rear tires is amazing. DCTs have near EV levels of torque management capabilities.
So with the C8 and 911 they can’t be characterized as merely RWD for straight line acceleration purposes because of weight distribution. One of the biggest issues with launching is that by the time weight transfer happens tires are already spinning, so to get a good launch you want a softer suspension which would ruin the car’s performance at corner exit. Being mid or rear engined helps there because you’re starting with 55-60% of the mass over the rear wheels which is closer to AWD than RWD for launch traction.
I find it highly unlikely an automatic would have better fuel economy than a manual.
I saw a study from, I think it was Volvo, that basically concluded that while trained drivers focusing on driving efficiently could get better fuel economy out of a manual, 'normal' people driving normally got better fuel efficiency out of an automatic. And this was a good 10 years ago, so automatics have only gotten better.
Training on manual cars also improved last 10 years. Don't know about other countries but here fuel economy is a mandatory part of training. Recent manual cars provide indicators on when to switch. You can combine that signal and training for better fuel economy. TBH, I don't know how that compares with automatic.
At one point I had two manual and two automatic Citroën XMs, with identical 2.0 litre fuel-injected engines. On average driving, all four got 32mpg.
Bear in mind this was a relatively primitive late-80s Zf 4HP18 gearbox, with a lockup clutch in 3rd and 4th, giving similar ratios to 4th and 5th with the manual box. If anything the manual box let the engine rev a couple of hundred RPM higher in 5th, but the auto box would drop briefly out of lockup on moderate acceleration in top allowing the engine to reach a bit higher speed.
Mostly that the OEM's engineers can choose to tune it to upshift or resist downshifting in situations where the average consumer with a manual would just wind it out.
Why do you think it unlikely an automatic can match or exceed a manual in fuel economy? Computers can better fit the torque needs to the most efficient RPM than most humans will, it's not a hard problem to solve.
Traditionally (and this is from the very olden days) manuals had an extra gear over automatics, which is why they'd have better fuel economy. Also less drivetrain loss. Nowadays the reverse is true, automatics consistently have more gears to play with, and automatic clutch packs are fantastically fast & good.
Now an efficient automatic is more complicated to design & manufactur, but that's where economies of scale and advancements in engineering tools and manufacturing come into play
In large SUV with powerful engine, modern automatic transmission like ZF 8speed surely have better fuel economy than scenario adequate manual transmission.
Sixt rental cars in France hasn’t been doing manual transmission cars for years - automatics get better gas mileage and are actually better on overall emissions (you’ll notice modern manual cars keep the revs up even when you let off the throttle). Germany has followed, I believe. But you’re right, it’s probably those dumb Americans’ fault.
I think they are referring to rev hang that occurs in newer manual transmissions where the ECU is tuned to not drop revs quickly for emissions reasons. This makes for an annoying 1st-to-2nd gear shift because the driver must wait a long time between shifts before engaging the clutch in order to shift smoothly. Mostly only newer MTs do this - some worse than others.
That's fascinating. I had a manual hire car this summer and I kept getting the 1st - 2nd shift wrong and juddering - I was wondering why I suddenly couldn't shift well (I've exclusively driven manuals for years, so it wasn't as straightforward as being out of practice). I wonder if that was why.
I have an AC in the Netherlands. It’s in the guest room for when our American friends visit and we occasionally all pile in there for the two (non-consecutive) days to weeks of the year it is ridiculously hot.
Eu here: have ac and man tx.
So does everyone i know.
A big difference may be that we turn on the ac only when really necessary, and a manual tx isn't that hard...kids at 16 do it, and have to pass their tests doing it in that, if you take your test in an automatic you are not allowed to drive a manual without being considered a learner again.
I grew up learning to drive a manual transmission car. Awesome. I loved the feeling of driving and shifting gears up the hilly, mountainous, twisty horrible roads in Jamaica. Exhilarating!
But cars got better. I got older, and now automatic transmissions are so much more efficient than manual transmissions * for ordinary people *.
We're not talking about people who love driving here. We are talking about people who drive an ordinary car. People who just want to commute and relax. We are not talking about Porsche or Konignsegg's (sp) latest car with a manual transmission.
These days I'm in a taxi in Thailand almost every day, and half of the drivers use a manual transmission and the other half use an automatic transmission. I think the reason is that cars with manual transmissions are older and cheaper.
But at the same time, the driving experience in those taxis with the manual transmission is horrible. Herky-jerky, and most of the drivers don't even know how to use the manual correctly.
The world changes. It is what it is.