Do You Drive Stick? Fans of Manual Transmission Can’t Let Go [View all]

Alan Macey is clutching the past. Three years ago, he persuaded his wife to ditch the family automatic for a car with a manual transmission, once commonly known as the stick shift. But the 33-year-old Michigan man, a designer at Jeep, part of Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV, knows only too well the downshifting fortunes of the stick.

The proportion of cars and light trucks in the U.S. sold with manual transmissions has fallen to around 7% in 2014 from 35% in 1980, according to WardsAuto, which keeps data on car manufacturing and sales. The decline is expected to accelerate as high-performance sports cars, once holdouts, increasingly shift to hybrid automatics.

While some young buyers still crave the clutch, most are disinclined to manually shift gears, according to Clay Voorhees, an associate professor at Michigan State University, who studies the attitude of millennials toward cars.

“The high of getting the Facebook update outweighs the emotional high of experiencing the G-forces of going around a corner,” Mr. Voorhees said. In other words, he explained, “Driving a manual is going to make you less able to text or check your phone.”

Mr. Macey is among those in the minority. “We find joy in those fleeting moments between ratios; the crescendo of rpm, the gentle click of the gate, the building inertia in our chest as the drivetrain becomes whole again,” he wrote in a manifesto that helped give birth to The Manual Gearbox Preservation Society, a movement in the making whose Facebook page has 27 likes.

With advances in automatic-transmission technology, stick-shift adherents confess that their oft-used arguments about fuel economy and performance are starting to slip like a worn clutch. A proliferation of gears means automatics are now better able to keep engines in their “sweet spots” where they run most efficiently, said Ed Hellwig, executive editor at Edmunds.Com.

Stick supporters instead fall back on describing the intangible feeling of downshifting around a corner. Or they point out that learning how to drive a stick-shift car—a true lesson in fits and starts—pays off when renting a car in Europe, where the manual transmission remains popular.

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Three-pedal purists have made an impact on the high-end sports-car market. Used Ferraris and Lamborghinis with manuals now sell for $15,000 to $20,000 more than those with paddle-shift gear boxes, which have no clutch pedal and small paddle-shaped shifters, said Ted Taormina, who repairs exotic sports cars in San Carlos, Calif.

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Sports-car salesmen in Silicon Valley describe test drives with prospective buyers stuck in the passenger seat because they hadn’t mastered the stick. Yet, they still made the sale. Driving instructors are still asked to pass along the dying art of heel-and-toe driving. Graham Gullett, who has a driving school in Atlanta, argues that people who drive manual transmissions are more engaged and pay closer attention to the road.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/do-you-drive-stick-fans-of-manual-transmission-cant-let-go-1447120357