Almost like clockwork, a similarly outdated technology, articles will appear regularly in various driving publications lamenting the fall of the manual transmission.
Standard? That's a laugh — while most manufacturers don't charge extra for the stick shift (yet), it's a rarity on the order sheet, and a unicorn on the dealer lot.
That latter's the big one too, in today's instant-gratification culture. Having finally decided to make the leap for a new car, who wants to wait three months to order the stick shift version when the automatic transmission is right there, offering more flexibility for the street, better fuel economy and quicker performance?
So, label me a staunch defender of the manual transmission, give me a little H-pattern badge to stick on my lapel and a secret handshake modelled after a 1-2-3 shift and a left leg that gets itchy in the driver's seat if it has nothing to do. However, I think it's finally time for an admission. I like manual transmissions, but that makes me a crazy person.
Consider the Hellcat.
Ooh boy, that's a hefty consideration indeed: 707 horsepower worth of big American bruiser (built in Brampton, eh?), with an elephant-sized engine and doomed back tires. It's a really neat car, and I've driven both the Challenger and Charger versions, with both transmission options in the two-door.
Here's the thing about the eight-speed automatic box in the Hellcat — it just works better. Its shifts are imperceptibly quick, its cruising manners impeccable. Then, stomp the throttle on an on-ramp and the thing dumps four gears in a microsecond as the engine catapults you forward, roaring with primeval fury. This is great fun. Find yourself behind the wheel of one of these things and you'll likely repeat the procedure until the RCMP show up and tell you to stop.
The six-speed manual, available only in the Challenger, has a ponderous, railway-switch feeling, and can't be hurried. You ram it home into third and the whole car crabs sideways with the torque. This too is endless fun — or at least endless fun until Officer Bummer shows up. Drat.
The thing is, the person who buys the automatic Hellcat will have just as good a time as the manual version, and will be faster at the dragstrip and burn less fuel driving to and from it. So why does the automatic have such trouble being perceived as a performance option?
Let's take another example, Porsche's PDK dual-clutch gearboxes. If the Hellcat's are an eightspeed sledgehammer, then these things are a seven-speed scalpel. There are those that will argue that the PDK is an automated manual, in that it has twin clutches and a more direct engagement, but if you don't engage the flappy paddles it'll happily shift through the gears without input. That's an auto, in my book.
On the track, a PDK-equipped Porsche is simply telepathic in gear selection. The product of countless hours of engineering, it always seems to be in the right gear, and should you wish to shift yourself, it's far quicker than the clutch-and-stick dance to accomplish the same thing. Novice drivers can concentrate more on getting around the corners quicker, taking better lines, and generally dusting off compatriots in vehicles equipped with automatics.
You'd never call either gearbox a "slushbox," so why then does such an epithet exist? I'll give you another example: the conventional six-speed automatic gearbox in the Mazda3 and Mazda CX-5 is better than the standard option. It shifts quicker, it has a very direct engagement, and it gets better economy. If you buy the manual version, you're being silly. Granted, you're being my kind of silly, but still.
When the Hydramatic gearboxes first came out in the 1940s and 1950s, things weren't so rosy. Gear selection was a leisurely affair, well-suited to the long land-liners of the time. In Europe, where nobody had any money, a stick shift was required to stir up a small-displacement engine just to get anywhere, but in North America we cruised.
Perhaps that's what has given the automatic transmission such inertia in being the soft choice, the one an enthusiast would never choose. It's time to stop the dissent. A modern automatic transmission in something like a Corvette Z06 is simply the better option. The fact that the GT3 only comes with a PDK gearbox just makes sense. There's no need for Subaru to offer their Forester XT with a six-speed, as they once did in the mid-2000s. These days, automatic transmissions provide all the responsiveness, economy, and performance you could want.
But.
There's something appealing to the human brain about imperfection. The reason the standard transmission holds such appeal in the enthusiast camp isn't because it's somehow "manly" to drive one, or even because having the skills to handle the stick shift is something to be bragged about. It's not even that it gives you something to do.
At some point, autonomous cars are going to provide yet another layer between the car and its driver. The hope is that we will have fewer accidents because the computers will be in charge. Sensible, I suppose, but sad.
Driving a manual transmission requires something of the driver other than to simply sit there and be a passenger. You have to pay a little more attention. You have to be a bit more involved in the process.
My prediction is that it will decay from the ends, with high-dollar and cheap machines gradually losing the option until only affordable performance cars like the VW GTI or Subaru WRX still offer a stick. At that point, after even more development work concentrating on improving the transmission that most people buy — the automatic — you'll have to be crazy to not take the car that's sitting right there on the lot. The good kind of crazy, sure, but still crazy.
Brendan McAleer is a freelance writer and automotive enthusiast. Contact him at [email protected]. Follow Brendan on Twitter: @brendan_mcaleer.
