Why do brain exercises when you can drive a manual?

There was a time when nobody real­ly need­ed an expla­na­tion of what a man­u­al car was. You got in, pressed the clutch, select­ed a gear and drove away. No pad­dles, no ​“PRNDL”, no com­put­er decid­ing which gear you appar­ent­ly need. Just you, the car and a lit­tle bit of mechan­i­cal teamwork.

But that time seems to be slow­ly disappearing.

And per­haps that is a shame for more than just our car-lov­ing hearts.

A recent arti­cle by Japan­ese Best Car Web high­lights an inter­est­ing aspect of dri­ving a man­u­al: active­ly oper­at­ing the clutch, gear lever and accel­er­a­tor while simul­ta­ne­ous­ly keep­ing an eye on traf­fic and your sur­round­ings requires more cog­ni­tive activ­i­ty. The arti­cle refers to research into cog­ni­tive activ­i­ty while driving.

In a man­u­al car, you are con­stant­ly doing sev­er­al things at once. You feel how high the engine is revving, decide when to shift up, choose the right gear for what is com­ing and oper­ate the clutch and accel­er­a­tor at the same time. A round­about approach­ing? You might need to down­shift. Want to over­take some­one? You might delib­er­ate­ly choose a low­er gear. And if you’re real­ly on your game, you might even give the throt­tle a lit­tle blip on the downshift.

All of that while still hav­ing to pay atten­tion to what­ev­er the rest of the traf­fic is get­ting up to.

An auto­mat­ic takes many of those deci­sions away from you. That’s incred­i­bly con­ve­nient and exact­ly why we don’t mind hav­ing one when we’re stuck in a twen­ty-kilo­me­tre traf­fic jam. But with a man­u­al, you remain much more active­ly involved in what the car is doing. You have to antic­i­pate and react, rather than sim­ply press­ing the accel­er­a­tor and brake.

In oth­er words: maybe that old-fash­ioned clutch is cheap­er than a sub­scrip­tion to a brain-train­ing app.

So per­haps we should­n’t tell our par­ents that we’re ​“com­ing home with anoth­er old man­u­al”. We’re sim­ply tak­ing pre­ven­ta­tive mea­sures for our cog­ni­tive health.

Why does every­thing have to be automatic?

Of course, auto­mat­ics have their advan­tages. They’re more com­fort­able in traf­fic, mod­ern trans­mis­sions shift incred­i­bly quick­ly and, in some cars, the com­put­er is sim­ply bet­ter at choos­ing the right gear than we are.

But faster isn’t always more fun.

There is some­thing incred­i­bly sat­is­fy­ing about a man­u­al car that you grad­u­al­ly learn to under­stand. After a while, you bare­ly have to think about what you’re doing. You feel when the clutch starts to bite, you know exact­ly how much throt­tle to give it and your hand almost instinc­tive­ly finds the right gear.

A good gear change can feel like a lit­tle achieve­ment. Let­ting the clutch out smooth­ly, shift­ing at exact­ly the right moment and hav­ing the engine land neat­ly in the next gear’s rev range. And a per­fect­ly exe­cut­ed down­shift with a lit­tle rev-match gives you a kind of sat­is­fac­tion that an auto­mat­ic sim­ply can­not replicate.

And the best part is that you don’t need to be dri­ving fast to enjoy it.

Even on an ordi­nary trip to the super­mar­ket, a per­fect­ly timed gear change can make the dri­ve that lit­tle bit more enjoy­able. You’re no longer sim­ply some­one oper­at­ing a car; you’re actu­al­ly inter­act­ing with the machine.

That may be the great­est charm of a man­u­al. The car reacts to what you do, you react to what the car does, and as you get to know each oth­er bet­ter, that inter­ac­tion becomes increas­ing­ly natural.

An auto­mat­ic can shift per­fect­ly. But a good dri­ver can make a car do exact­ly what they want it to do at that par­tic­u­lar moment.

And for us as car enthu­si­asts, there is some­thing rather spe­cial about that.

An endan­gered species

The prob­lem is that we’re get­ting few­er and few­er of them.

Accord­ing to Best Car Web, the share of new cars sold with a man­u­al trans­mis­sion in Japan has now fall­en to only around 1 – 2 per­cent. The selec­tion is shrink­ing in Europe as well. More and more mod­els are avail­able exclu­sive­ly with an auto­mat­ic trans­mis­sion, and even when a man­u­al is still offered, it is often one of the first things to dis­ap­pear from the range.

And, to be fair, that makes sense. Auto­mat­ic trans­mis­sions are com­fort­able, effi­cient and per­fect­ly suit­ed to the increas­ing­ly auto­mat­ed cars of today.

But for enthu­si­asts, it still feels a lit­tle as though we’re slow­ly los­ing a part of what makes dri­ving special.

Because a gear lever is, in the end, just a sim­ple mechan­i­cal com­po­nent. Yet that lit­tle lever, togeth­er with that third ped­al, cre­ates a direct con­nec­tion between dri­ver and car that is dif­fi­cult to replace.

So per­haps we should start appre­ci­at­ing the man­u­als that are still around.

Because in twen­ty years, we might look back at an ordi­nary man­u­al hatch­back in much the same way we look at a clas­sic car today: not because it was par­tic­u­lar­ly fast, lux­u­ri­ous or rare, but because it did some­thing that new cars sim­ply don’t anymore.

It let you change gear.

And if some­one asks us then why we still dri­ve such an old car?

“Because it has a clutch.”

Sounds like rea­son enough to us.

At Driver.community, we’ve known this for a while

To be hon­est, this isn’t exact­ly a new rev­e­la­tion at Driver.community. We’ve known for quite some time that shift­ing gears is sim­ply an impor­tant part of the dri­ving expe­ri­ence. That’s why we make sure our fleet con­tains plen­ty of cars that let you choose your own gears, oper­ate the clutch and expe­ri­ence that mechan­i­cal con­nec­tion with the car.

Because ulti­mate­ly, Driver.community isn’t just about cars that get you from A to B. It’s about the expe­ri­ence behind the wheel.

And as long as we have some­thing to say about it, there will always be plen­ty of shift­ing to do in our fleet. 😉