Really drive a clutch

At least with a car with a manual transmission, you have to REALLY drive the car. With an automatic, it is point and go, no skill necessary. The feel of automatics is not there. Now, real clutch drivers don't need no syncro gear box!

By DAVE ADDIS, The Virginian-Pilot October 24, 2004 My learned colleagues on the editorial page wrote an early obituary yesterday for the manual transmission in modern automobiles.
Their premise was correct: Well-publicized news stories through the week documented that standard-shift cars and trucks are disappearing from the marketplace.
But their argument, in spots, calls for rebuttal.
Such as the description of manual transmissions as “finicky” devices that had “bedeviled drivers for decades.”
Properly approached, a standard-shift lever in an automobile is about as finicky as a spoon or a fork.
“Bedeviled”? By what? The light on the modern automobile dashboard that tells you when to shift?
Anybody who is “bedeviled” by the prospect of coordinating a left foot with a right hand probably should not attempt even to waltz, let alone maneuver 2 tons of ferrous metals at highway speeds approaching that of a light aircraft.
Further, my colleagues advised that only two classes of drivers could possibly desire a stick-shift nowadays: the poverty-stricken, as standard transmissions are cheaper; and the wealth-stricken, who yearn to drop a wad of their tax-cut windfalls on a Maserati or a Porsche.
Thus, they harrumphed, the standard-shift vehicle “will remain the choice for those who can’t afford anything else, and for those who can afford everything else.”
Many of us don’t fit neatly into either of those classes but still love a standard-shift car. I own two.
The fundamental fault with the editorial, however, lies in its acceptance of the premise that what occurs on the highways of Tidewater every day can be called “driving,” and that the people involved are by definition “drivers.”
If you are eating an Egg McMuffin while chatting on the telephone, fiddling with the CD player as the kids in back fight over which DVD to watch on the multiple built-in television screens, and peeking occasionally at your satellite-enabled LED display to figure out where you are going or if you have gotten there yet, you are not really driving.
What you are doing is pushing a mobile living room across a concrete landscape. What you are doing could be charitably described as “steering.” But please don’t call it driving.
I taught myself to drive a standard-shift on a beat-up 1959 MGA roadster that I bought for a song just after college. Its four-speed transmission was what we called a “crash box” – that is, the gear mechanisms were not neatly synchronized to the engine speed, as they are today.
No light on the dashboard told you when to shift.
In fact, the only gauge on that dashboard that actually worked was the oil-pressure gauge, and it gave constant bad-news updates on the state of my piston rings.
“Driving” today involves just one sense: sight.
Driving a clapped-out ’59 MG required every sense. The driver selected the proper gear on a combination of sight, the engine’s sound, and the feel of the machine through the shifter, the pedals and the seat of his pants, which was planted about 14 inches above the roadway.
(Those pedants who believe I’ve left out two senses – smell and taste – have never driven an ancient British sports car. Those who have became taste-and-smell connoisseurs of blue clouds of oil smoke. It was actually possible, at times, to detect an MG’s engine distress by the smells inside the cockpit.)
This is not meant to be one of those weepy-geezer paeans to the “good old days.” Geezers used to moan about automobiles, “They don’t build ’em like they used to,” to which I would always answer, “Thank God.” Cars today are better, all around, than ever. Even the geezers know that.
But that doesn’t mean the drivers are better. Too many are too brain-dead even to master a simple side-door mirror, let alone a clutch. It frightens me to see how many people will twist their neck and stare backward over their shoulder while plunging forward at 70 mph into a wall of merging traffic.
(Why is it that the same people who trust what they see in their makeup mirror can never seem to trust what they see in their rear-view mirror? I don’t understand that.)
My editorial colleagues are absolutely right in one respect: For the sort of motoring involved in most of Tidewater’s commutes, an automatic transmission is the better choice. Stop-and-go, crawl-and-scoot driving on a manual transmission will leave your left leg looking like Popeye’s right arm, and it’s just as bad on the machine.
My wife and I – she’s a country girl who’s at home with a clutch – stuck with our manual shifters for years, but finally went “automatic” on the cars we use to commute around town. A couple of vehicles that we maintain in wilder locales still require a flexible left leg.
Anybody who has lived outside this cozy Southeast Virginia cocoon of flat earth and mild weather understands why. The value of four-on-the-floor cannot be overestimated when trapped in a sand pit, a snowbank, a mudhole, or a ditch that came into play after hitting a patch of black ice on a midnight mountain road.
Drivers who grew up on these flat, unfrozen local byways probably have never heard of the concept of “rocking” an automobile out of such traps – a perilous cause without a clutch to guide your wheel speed, but the best way of rescuing yourself without resorting to a $100 call to the guy with the hook.
Is the clutch pedal dead? Or the sole province of those who inhabit the opposite societal poles of poverty and wealth?
I dunno. As I said, we own vehicles that have one and vehicles that don’t. But to steal from a line on those bumper stickers that I read while stalled in Tidewater traffic, “I’ll give up my clutch when they pry my cold, dead toes from around it.”