Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Willie the Duck" data-source="post: 8777712" data-attributes="member: 6799660">It's all self-group normalization. There's no 'right way' for a car to be in terms of such things*. The first cars didn't have automatic ignition, but few people look down on people for not still using hand cranks to start their cars, even though they are an almost direct parallel*. At least the people looking down on automatic drivers aren't like the people who pat themselves on the back/deride those who didn't for having grown up before seat belts/airbags/bike helmets or other safety features (where one is trying to claim superiority for a genuinely worse situation). It's hard to predict, but I imagine as we move towards a preponderance of hybrid and electric vehicles that the the whole manual vs. automatic distinction will just fall by the wayside (sorry) of primary ways that people group-select around car ownership**. *I have opinions on the 'right way' for a car to be in terms of safety, mileage, range, and whether any non-luxury version is affordable to low- and middle-class incomes family, but not something like this.**the automatic version being a small but significant engineering complexity/price bump and it being easier to swap over to the other style going from manual to automatic than the reverse, but otherwise the automatic variety is generally a convenience with few downsides.***So much as it ever was. Growing up, I remember the primary group distinction being people who steadfastly 'bought American,' or even were 'a Ford family' or the like.The notion of better gas mileage was cemented in the early years of automatics, when there was an actual mechanical drive-power loss of the viscous fluid couplings. With modern automatics, it is a ridiculously scrupulous manual driver (and likely only on highway driving) who can get significantly better gas mileage than an automatic. All well within the general noise of extraneous factors.</blockquote>

Verification