Manual transmission is the norm outside of the US
this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2026
7 points (53.5% liked)
Unpopular Opinion
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I daily a manual and this is a braindead take
Ill upvote since the amish feel if you don't use a harness you are just letting a machine drive.
If you don’t push your vehicle with your own physical strength, you can only suggest/“point” a car
Fred Flintstone may have been an asshole.....but he sure knew how to drive!
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If your car is not drawn by animals, you are not driving it. You might be piloting or controlling it, but not driving it.
I don't see the problem.
For those conveyances, I believe a bit of fermentation is required. Spicy writing utensils, as it were
The cow keeps dropping the damn pencils IDK how you guys do this.
You need to haft it with an adamantium core shrouded in alfalfa straw as was passed down by the elders. The brush head should be made of the hair of it's brethren to inspire a proper amount of reverence and fear
Look at this amateur with power steering, automatic choke, and an electric starter.
Plenty of motorycles in this world with none of those things. You're telling me you need a roof, too? I used to ride mine to school in the snow and the rain. Uphill, both ways!
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If you’ve never used a hand crank to turn the engine over, you’ve never really started a car.
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Not an unpopular opinion, just gatekeeping.
yup. have driven rx7's and vw bugs, it takes a certain set of skills but it's nothing to be insulting about.
good luck with your clutch replacement dudes lol
Pfft, amateur.
If you can't manually adjust ignition timing and air:fuel ratios you can't really drive a car.
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Where is this unpopular, America? That's just a fact.
I’ve driven both extensively and you know what? I’m down for an automatic transmission and turbo in city traffic. I’ll reconsider a manual if I move out to the sticks again.
I drove a manual for a long commute for years. Developed sciatica as a result.
If you can't shift gears faster than 120ms you're inferior to the automatic already.
You think f1 drivers are fucking around with a clutch? Get off your horse and realize everyone and their half siblings have moved on.
This is from a crusty guy who taught many a fine lady how to drive the ol stick shift. That was such a great pickup line.
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I'm about as big a car enthusiast as a person can be. I've built everything, rock crawlers, drag cars, drift cars, and road race cars. I've had lowriders and lifted trucks. I've owned automatics, 4, 5, and 6 speed manuals, 3-speed column shift manuals, cvts, an electric car, and a push button shifted Chrysler imperial. I've driven cars, heavy machinery, boats, planes, and even a hovercraft one time.
While I love my manual cars, to say a person can't drive until they learn to operate a manual is one of the dumbest opinions I've ever heard.
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Driving has to involve a clutch? I'm very confused by this. Manual driver btw.
Gatekeepers be keepin gates.
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This is kind of, by-definition, wrong, not just unpopular.
For the simple reason that even though I only tried to learn manual once, I can drive any electric car without issue.
Hell even before that, some people could drive trucks or buses or motorcycles, but not all people with driver's licenses could.
If we came up with a different word for driving other types of cars, then it would make sense. But we didn't, so driving just refers to the broad concept of operating various types of motor vehicles, usually at relatively high speed, but not exclusively.
And that's quite frankly because even without manually operating a clutch, driving is still a huge skillset that most people struggle to excel at.
If you've only ever operated fuel-injected vehicles then you don't really know how to start a car
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Just for kicks I'll throw in my unpopular opinion: "If you have to use 1st gear then you don't know how to drive manual"
Probably still use the clutch though right rookie?
Rev match gang!
This one depends a lot on the gearing. Most cars you can start in 2nd gear but there are some where it kinda falls apart
A Hyundai Excel can start in 5th. You shouldn't, it's bad, but it works.
My old car suddenly lost first gear one day (seriously it was fine when I parked it one evening and from the next morning on it simply wouldn't shift into 1st, super weird and out of nowhere). Thankfully that car actually had decent lowend for an economy-box and I was able to daily it like that for another year or so. I can tell you now though that it would've been much tougher to deal with that had it happened to my current ride.
That gets trough technical? Or are you in a country where they don't do that?
The second one
You kids and your horseless carriages
I never drove a vehicle with automatic transmission, so I'd like struggle with it until I could finally make sense of how it works... But when it comes to manual transmission, every vehicle I once drove and am currently driving had/have manual transmission, with some brands having different ways to actuate the backward movement.
Also, besides two cars I once rented, practically all the vehicles I'm experienced at are old (before 2010, including having driven a very old VW Beetle sometimes). The two, "modern" cars I rented (Renault Kwid and Citroen C3) were awful to me, even though I'm quite young and accustomed to tech, those cars felt more like toys than actual cars (clutch isn't connected to the transmission and accelerator/gas isn't connected to the carburetor , pedals felt like a frickin joystick, car's starting engine isn't connected to the key system like in old cars, panel looks like a damn Christmas tree with all the blinking LEDs, every command is "decided" by the embedded computer).
Given how I'm totally unaware of how exactly an automatic transmission vehicle is supposed to be operated, am I also someone who "can't drive, only suggest/point a car"?
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