[aldebran]

When you hand crank an engine to start it, you really feel connected with the car you’re going to drive.

An automobile doesn’t have the same connection with a rider as a horse does.

I get it. I’m a car person too. I loved stick shifts and in the beginning they were much better than automatics. But now they aren’t. Automatics are much faster, more energy efficient. So all the arguments against it have evaporated to “you can’t feel the connection”.

I wonder if the technology laggards feel the same way some of us do about transmissions…

[legitster]

As someone who exclusively buys cars with 100k+ miles, manuals still give you an order of magnitude more longevity in a car. Manuals are mechanically much simpler and clutch replacements are relatively cheap - an automatic transmission crapping out is a top source of premature deaths of vehicles.

You could argue a chainsaw is superior in every way to an axe, but the simplicity of the axe is a feature.