It’s a dark, drizzly night in Portland and my dad and I are sitting at a red light in his 1994 red Toyota Pickup. This is one of our many late night driving lessons. “Make sure it’s in first,” my dad tells me. As the light turns green, I take my right foot off the brake, set it on the gas, and finesse my way off the clutch with my left foot. Then again quickly: clutch down, second gear, give it a little gas while I slowly let go of the clutch. Thus, the journey of the manual.
It is no secret that for Americans, driving a stick shift is a dying art. The Wall Street Journal reports that only 18% of U.S. drivers know how to operate a manual transmission. Currently, only 1% of cars produced for U.S. consumers have a manual transmission. This is a major long-term change, as in 1980, 35% of new cars in the U.S. were stick shift. Death is coming for the stick shift soon and the car industry knows it.
But the abandonment of the stick shift comes at a cost, especially for young drivers. There are many benefits that come with driving a manual transmission. Firstly, cars with a shifter tend to be cheaper, with the average cost of a manual being about $2,000 to $8,000 less than its automatic equivalent. This largely comes as a result of the lowered demand for stick shift cars, as fewer and fewer people know how to drive them.
Secondly, driving a manual dramatically increases gas mileage, making the car far more fuel-efficient. Burning less gas can drastically reduce a single person’s carbon emissions. Lastly, a manual increases driving awareness. The largest cause of car-related deaths in the U.S. comes from distracted driving mostly from the act of texting while driving, and teens and young adults have the highest reported phone usage in cars. In a 2019 study conducted by the CDC, 39% of high school students said that they texted at least once while driving on their normal commute. Adding a shifter creates a very different environment for the driver, limiting the drivers ability to text on the road. The constant shifting requires both hands in use at all times.
In a study from the National Library of Medicine, male teen drivers with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder have a far greater accident rate than the general population. They are, however, shown to be far more attentive on the road when driving a stick shift car. The study showed that this heightened awareness leads to objectively safer driving from the study’s participants.
So why is the car industry abandoning potentially life-saving vehicles? One reason: an automatic is easier to drive. The act of driving is no longer romantic. The fantasy of driving into the sunset in a vintage sports car is no longer on driver’s minds. Modern drivers care more about the easy, simple driving you find in an automatic. Simple driving can easily lead into distracted driving.
Another reason why our culture has adopted the automatic is traffic. Many morning drives entail idling on a four lane road, traffic refusing to move. Traffic has increasingly gotten worse since the pandemic, and drivers, (especially in cities such as Portland), are less likely to purchase a stick shift, because of the tediousness of switching back and forth from first to second gear, in a constant loop. The worse the traffic gets, the less the manual will have a place in modern driving.
The stick shift should never become a thing of the past. It has long proved to be the perfect car for teen drivers, yet it is fading into obscurity. Making cars easier to drive creates a generation of lazier drivers.
This is a really informative article, I didn’t realize that driving a stick shift makes you pay more attention to your driving, but it makes sense. I always drove manual transmission cars, until I had to sit in traffic on 84 for my commute all the time, and switched to an automatic for exactly the reason you stated. I was sad to make the switch, I loved the control of driving a stick!