Technology aside, stick shifts have some advantages

This post was first published in the April 20, 2019, edition of the Wilson Times.

            Last month, the New York Times published an article suggesting that maybe the newest technology isn’t in the best interest of motorists. Self-driving cars have been involved in serious accidents that an attentive human driver could have easily avoided. Self-driving isn’t the only problem. Modern technology creates many distractions for drivers, and cell phones are not the only culprit.

Adding music from a radio, a tape deck, a CD player, a Bluetooth connection with your iPod or streaming services all distract the driver from his/her primary task, which is avoiding an accident while driving at 60 or 70 mph. Small distractions can be deadly. By my calculations, when you’re driving 70 mph on a highway, you’re traveling 103 feet per second. How long does it take to glance at your phone or change radio stations? Three seconds? You just traveled the length of a football field. I hope nobody was in your way.

Maybe it’s time, the NYT writer suggested, to get back to standard transmissions. Now you’re talking.

            I drove stick-shift cars almost exclusively for 16 years and taught my children how to drive a stick. At one point, we owned three vehicles, all with stick shifts. The stick shift has several advantages over automatics, which have become standard over the past 60 years. You can’t hold a cell phone or apply makeup while driving a stick. And a stick shift makes your car far less likely to be stolen. There have been numerous reports of attempted carjackings (including one in Wilson around 20 years ago) that were foiled when the carjacker realized he couldn’t drive a car with a manual transmission. Car thieves appear to be too uncoordinated to drive a stick, or maybe it’s the difficulty of shifting gears while holding a gun that thwarts them. At any rate, your car is far less likely to be stolen if it has a clutch pedal.

            The greatest disadvantage to driving a stick shift happens when you’re stuck in traffic. In a two-hour backup like the one I was involved in on I-95 recently, you can wear out your left knee in no time, shifting from neutral to first gear, to neutral, to first gear, ad infinitum as traffic creeps along. My leg aches just thinking about it. There is also the disadvantage of starting on a hill, which requires coordinating left and right feet to find the friction point and just the right amount of gas so you don’t stall or make the engine roar.

            Those small disadvantages didn’t bother me in the 14 years I drove a sporty, nimble little two-seat roadster. When I decided I needed to replace the car, which had developed several age-related problems, I looked for another stick shift, and I found out how rare manual transmissions had become. A friend in the new car business said his dealership used to get about 40 percent manual transmission vehicles, but that had plummeted to 8 percent and now is even lower. Even “performance” cars such as Corvettes, Porsches or Miatas have gone to automatics, so I settled on a used six-speed coupe that didn’t have a removable roof or the agility of my smaller roadster.

            I’m currently driving a small sedan with an automatic transmission, Bluetooth and other technology I craved. Since I usually keep a car for more than a decade, I was concerned that my left knee might not hold up to the clutch-engaging stress in my eighth decade.

            I find myself like most car owners, driving a car that is comfortable, well-equipped, smarter than I am in many ways, equipped with all sorts of warning devices, including a rear-view camera, a vehicle that requires little activity from me and offers many distractions.  While I yearn for the fun of that long-lost roadster, I worry about getting too comfortable in my car. There are a lot of distracted drivers out there, and I don’t want to join them.

Hal Tarleton is a former editor of The Wilson Daily Times. Contact him at haltarleton@myglnc.com.