I hate them so much. Otherwise great cars are completely ruined by touchscreens. What was wrong with tactile knobs you could operate one handed without looking? You’re driving for fuck’s sake.
It’s why things like the GR Corolla are nearly miraculous in 2023, it even comes stick shift only.
As an European, where we drive mostly stick, it's funny to observe the newfound US love for stick shifts. It's funny because it happened almost exactly when automatics became good!
Good dual clutch gearboxes are amazing, but even "classic" ones like BMW's ZF6 or ZF8 are really close. ZF8 is so good BMW uses it in the M3, instead of a dual clutch.
With these options, I'd never go back to stick shift. This after having half a million km driven on manual transmissions.
> it's funny to observe the newfound US love for stick shifts
Nobody in the US loves or drives stick shifts. There's been a steady drop in manual transmissions here from about 12% of the market in 2000 to 2% of the market today. The noise around them is just a very small vocal minority of enthusiasts who pine for the "old days". I'm definitely one of those enthusiasts, but I have to face reality that they're effectively gone. I haven't had a stick for a daily driver since about 2010. I do still have older manual sports cars that I can drive and enjoy when I wish.
Yeah, I certainly wouldn't knock those who love driving manual. Part of why I like riding my motorcycle is that it's a manual.
But in LA traffic, I'd rather drive an automatic so I can put my brain into "autopilot" while playing an audiobook rather than have to constantly be shifting by hand. It irks me how so many manual-lovers have this superiority complex over people who just want a car that will get them from A to B. Have fun with your manuals, but don't speak as if I'm an imbecile because I don't think driving manual is fun in heavy traffic.
I’ve driven manual my whole car life and in heavy US traffic. When you get accustomed, your brain goes into “auto-pilot” and does the shifting too anyway.
I had been riding in SoCal for a few years and I'd say doing the autopilot thing when split laning is not very safe. Too many folks trying to suddenly merge into HOV lane solid lines be damned
This is the exact reason I bought an automatic. I had a 1994 BMW 318is that I loved, but I spent probably a couple thousand hours on the 91 freeway in southern California pushing the clutch in and out. The BMW "sporty" clutch was a leg workout and a half. The return spring was super stiff. Sometimes I would play a game to see if I could stay in first and just let my lead distance increase enough to not have to stop at all, but it pissed people off so bad.
This is actually how you're supposed to drive in traffic.
Give more space to the car in front of you and try to stay at a constant speed. You will see truckers do this a lot.
It also is much better for your car and mental health. You don't need to accelerate to a complete stop over and over.
I do this every time I'm in very bad traffic (Think inching along and coming to a complete stop multiple times).
However about 10% of the time I get some idiot behind me that thinks that I'm going to slow so they speed around me just to come to a complete stop 2 seconds later.
I tried it once or twice. It was great for the first minute or so, until the lady in the car behind me started honking, screaming, revving her engine, and pretending like she was going to ram my bumper. People HATE when I try to reach average traffic speeds instead of just cramming my car as close to the one in front of me as I dare.
this was always a key point from people who drove automatics but claimed to like manuals. i daily drove a manual in some of the worst traffic the US has to offer. but so what, guess what else sucks in traffic? Automatics!! when you're stuck in traffic, everything sucks, so you might as well drive something thats enjoyable the rest of the time.
I've never really seen the issue with "manual in traffic" -- there's almost always a gear or two that allow you to go a the speed of traffic without tons of shifting. Stop and go? 2nd probably goes from "creep" to "moderate speed"
Anyhow, electric cars are better all around -- at least those with "one pedal driving" where the speed pedal goes all the way to zero or nearly zero.
My dislike of automatics is the indeterminate lag between request for a particular speed and when the car decides to shift to the appropriate gear to get to that speed as quickly as I've indicated I want to get there. Plus with ICE cars there's all sorts of other tedious inertia to contend with around engine RPM and turbo spool state and such. At least a manual provides better determinism around throttle behavior.
Ahh sweet summer child. Traffic that has a speed isn't really traffic in my book. It isn't really traffic until you spend more time stopped than moving.
Joking aside, the worst traffic is when you stop every 4 seconds and then creep forward ten feet before stopping again. If I wasn't planning to go car-less I think I would buy an electric car for that nonsense.
Oh, I live in metro boston and before that lived in the slurm of southern california, and have not at any time owned a car with an automatic transmission... The workload from gear shifting is more than zero, but not (for me) oppressively so.
Even "stop and go" traffic eventually has some average speed and sometimes it is low enough that you've got to clutch in to come to a full stop and clutch out to go faster; modern engine management's pretty good at keeping the motor from stalling. Probably I annoy people by letting the lead in front of me get to be a couple car lengths before I decide to go, but that's on them... we'll all get there eventually.
Electric cars are the best in that you're basically always in first gear, the redline is basically infinite, and the car doesn't stall when the engine's not moving, so you don't need a clutch.
I completely agree with you regarding the power lag on automatics. Currently I'm driving a Jeep Renegade with a 9 speed automatic transmission, and I live in a really hilly area. The transmission needs to downshift CONSTANTLY because it's tuned to try to cruise the highway at 1500 RPM to maximize fuel efficiency.
If I'm running the air conditioner, it steals enough power that it has to downshift an extra time. It's bad enough that the constant shifting makes my son carsick. Luckily, it has a manual mode I can use to just drop it into 5th gear and it has the torque to smoothly climb the hills on cruise control that way, eliminating my son's carsickness.
"Semi-automatic" cars (aka an automatic transmission with a manual gear override available) are a nice compromise for those of us who want the simple convenience most of the time, with the ability to take control when we want to. Plus once the order comes in, those servo motors can shift the gear way faster than I can depress a clutch.
I'm only 30, but at this point a 15 year old car still feels kinda "new" to me. Up until a few months ago, I drove a 2008 Lexus, felt perfectly modern.
But in regards to driving a manual in traffic, does a diesel not make it easier? An engine suited to lower RPMs, but with more torque, seems perfectly suited to clutching in/out to shuffle along.
When I still drove I hated the way I had to keep my foot on the clutch in traffic jams. Or constantly switch to neutral. The clutch on my car was heavy. That's why I got an automatic.
But now I live in a city where I can take the metro to work and I don't own a car anymore. I hope I'll never need to drive again, I hate driving so much.
Enjoy it while it lasts. As of a couple years ago, more than half of all new cars sold in Europe are automatics. That doesn't seem too surprising, I imagine the same logic that made manuals appealing in the past is why automatics are appealing today.
Automatics are more fuel efficient, and govenment keeps raising the efficiency requirements. Automatics do this by having a lot of gears and changing up very aggressively. It would suck to drive a 7 or 9 speed manual (maybe truck drivers feel differently; I think 5 is optimal for a car) but automatics can manage it and squeeeze out another tenth of an MPG.
I love manual transmissions and will never buy an automatic unless forced to. I'd rather buy a used car with a manual than anything new.
I assume the efficiency requirements are why my car doesn't provide a way to permanently turn off the auto idle start/stop. The button's to temporarily disable it is convenient enough to make it something of a reflex. But it's a feature I really don't like when I'm making an unprotected left hand turn for example.
My wife's car has that; I find that if I stop and keep my foot very lightly on the brake, just enough to stop the car rolling, it doesn't shut the engine off. If I step more firmly on the brake while I'm stopped, it shuts the engine off.
Also some of the diagnostic scanners will have a way to disable the auto stop/start, or so I've heard. I have a scanner but haven't tried it on her car.
Noooo. Manuals are on average much more efficient. I drive a 1st generation Honda Insight, and the manual version gets ~10 mpg more than the automatic.
Modern pickups have 8-10 speed transmissions. They do a better job of keeping you in the power band.
In addtion, no heavy duty pickup comes with a manual anymore, but the ones that did years ago, de-tuned the engines in the manuals, so people didn't burn up the clutch. Modern Diesel Heavy Duty pickups only put their full 1000 ft/lbs to the wheels in 3rd gear or higher, something they can't enforce in a manual. Also, in most manuals (granted, its been a few years since I drove one) with turbos, pushing the clutch stats unspooling the turbo, where in most automatics, it does not. (since its knows your shifting, and not just coasting)
Yes, these are all related to driver skill, and a skilled driver will not cause problems. But I wouldn't want to warranty the systems on an 'average' driver..
> Modern pickups have 8-10 speed transmissions. They do a better job of keeping you in the power band.
This is so true. As someone who owns a fairly modern truck (2019 F250) that missed the good transmission by a single year. My truck would dearly love to have at least one more gear between 2nd and 3rd when I'm going up the mountain. I end up having to choose between trying to keep my inertia high (tough with corners) or give up and let it drop down to 35-40 so that 2nd gear isn't trying to tear the engine off the mounts.
I may end up putting in shorter differential gears to work around that. Don't really want to fork out for a new truck.
Automatics have been more efficient (given their additional mass) than manuals, for all but the most skilled drivers (top 1% of manual drivers) for several decades already.
I'm on the side fostering that change. Ever since I got a Mini Countryman with a ZF6. I was forced into an automatic because the car was a hybrid, and now I wouldn't go back to manual.
The car was a little janky from a dead stop, when running solely on gas. I probably would miss the precision for maneuvering you get with a clutch. I didn't, actually, because of the electric motor doing these operations perfectly.
I assume a lot of it is a retro thing like film and vinyl.
I donated my 20 year old Honda Del Sol two-seater stick shortly before the pandemic. It had a lot of miles on it and, with no commute, I just wasn't getting the use out of it to make it worth keeping. It was fun but there's no way I'd buy a stick today even if I were to have a "fun" car.
A few years ago I got a 53 Chevrolet pickup with a 3 speed (and a nice BW overdrive attachment). Learned how to drive a manual in that truck and will never buy an automatic again as long as I can choose. Actually operating the vehicle is extremely satisfying and fun. I’m swapping out the C-4 in my 65 mustang for a T-5 as soon as I can spare the cash/time. For me it’s definitely not a matter of practicality but a “vinyl” type of thing. My DD has a CVT but at least emulates shifting with paddles
The difference between being forced to use one vs choosing to use one.
I’ve driven some real nice autos, but when it comes to a car I enjoy driving, give me a nice sloppy GM T-56 or the crisp shifts of a BMW ZF stick. They’re just more fun. It’s the reason why I don’t have a C8 corvette.
But when it comes to day to day puttering around, auto all the way, and give me as many convenience features as you have. Radar cruise control? Yes please. Nothing worse than riding your clutch for an hour straight every day.
That is something that exists entirely in the minds of auto journalists. The number of manually-shifted cars has been in steady decline for decades. These last several years, it went from something like 3.7 % of new cars to 2.4% to 0.7% to 1.9%. You can see how a deceptive headline could be manufactured around the last two years of data.
drivers that enjoy manuals have always been around. We’re just louder now because they almost don't make cars with manuals anymore, so when one does come along we rejoice.
Genuine question: What exactly do you enjoy? Twenty years go, you could do a mountain road engine braking with downshifts, getting then the perfect gear for the turn apex and coming out perfectly balanced. But cars have changed. Engine braking is a lot less effective today (different compression ratios, better mechanics). Automatics now have more gears and allow you to manually select the gear, so you can control available torque in the turn.
It seems the advantages of manual transmissions no longer exist.
I dislike indeterminate lag between input and action.
With an automatic, there's a threshold where the car decides to downshift when asking for a particular increase in forward velocity; that set point will wander depending on current RPM state and velocity and drive gear ratio.
Modern cars are bad enough with turbos and fancy valve timing and throttle by wire stuff where the behavior of the thing is a big stack of jitter, but adding a transmission to the mix makes the response times even more random.
At least with a manual transmission, the behavior of the throttle pedal is far more predictable and direct -- down the engine will go faster (modulo the current drive gear) and up the engine will slow down and slow the car down. Often you're in the incorrect gear for a particular desired acceleration but there's a feedback loop that you participate in to recognize / avoid the issue (mash pedal, not much happens because you're in the wrong gear, you get feedback and decide to change gears). With an automatic, you're just yelling down to the engine room asking the hamster to get on a different wheel.
Predictable, usually. Lag free? Not in my experience. Most of the time there’s a good quarter to half second between requesting the shift and the transmission acting.
For me at least, that lag is very effective at disconnecting me from the experience of driving.
Oh, I don't dispute that maybe very modern cars have addressed this. I don't swap cars too often and have been pretty happy with my "one transmission, a planetary reduction gearbox" car (maybe there are 2 transmissions, one on the front motor and another on the rear motor? Regardless, there's a static gear ratio that's always engaged).
The lag is only part of the issue -- it's the determinism of the lag -- the 125ms lag between "more power please" and getting more power is actually more lag than the instant ka-chugachug of asking for more power and getting feedback of "you're in the wrong gear, bubba" if you're in a manual transmission car.
As far as "I won't change gears for you unless you ask" transmissions -- I've never driven such a car, I'm sure they're quite nice. I somewhat dislike the gear changers with no affordance to indicate what gear you're in (this applies to wingding manumatic cars, motorcycles, and modern bicycles with thumb / finger triggers) -- I don't use them often enough to have the muscle memory of "up for lower gear ratio" or whatever, I have to think about it and look at an indicator and fiddle with it to get the right ratio for what I want.
I'm sure with practice it would eventually be fine; but in actuality I've found that the electric car is actually exactly what I want.
DSG are wonderful but an added complexity for the sake of what? Shaving 0.5sec 0-60mph? Saving the hassle of slow traffic driving? Both can be fixed by learning to drive.
It's probably true that once you (more or less) need a screen for a decent backup camera and most people like a screen for at least GPS, it must be pretty tempting to at least think about what physical buttons can reasonably be eliminated given that the touchscreen is a given. And I do think a lot of designs go too far.
personal anecdotes, but the vast majority of me being a passenger to someone else's driving, they all used their mobile device for GPS. even the couple of cars i owned that had a nav system, the GPS came from the mobile device. it required their app to be installed to input the destination, making the internal unit just a second screen for your mobile.
From my experience with two cars with factory nav, it's nice because it will show the next instructions in the the dash area, so when you're looking down to check speed you also get that. And, one of my cars has an option to show the next several instructions (Ford Sync2, which everybody hates because the UI is really slow, and kind of ugly). On the other hand, pay to play for data updates sucks. And most importantly, safety requirements mean you either have to yell at the car and deal with dated voice recognition or stop to adjust things; even if you have a responsible passenger who could use the touch screen.
Mostly, I just use my phone. It's simpler and faster. My cars are too old for carplay/android auto, and my experience with android auto was that it was worse than the phone in a clip or a cupholder, but carplay seems nice. For longer drives to unfamiliar places, I'll put the address in the car too, sometimes the phone gets tired of listening to GPS.
I was recently driving to visit a friend near Mt Baker, WA. and about 10 miles out, in a not particularly wooded area, the phone said 'lost GPS signal' and just assumed I had stopped moving, and wasn't able to pick up GPS again for the rest of the drive. Not a huge deal, because I was just following the road and only had one last turn to make, and I had directions from the car's nav anyway.
GPS seemed to work ok on the return trip. And I was getting an LTE signal for most of the drive too (gets pretty spotty at my friend's house, but I was streaming music when the GPS stopped, and that kept working)
Sorry, I don't have a debugging tale here; almost all of my excursions into figuring out why an Android device is doing something wrong leave me wondering if the device is doing anything right, and usually without any more insight into the original problem. Not going to try to do it, unless it's important, and probably not on a vacation.
so you're one of those that likes to make cute and endearing backstories to give sympathy to an inanimate object rather than getting irate at a mechanical something that you pay a monthly service not working correctly because the thing to get mad at is out of your realm of control and that anger serve no purpose.
I use CarPlay if I'm actually navigating, not the built-in Garmin. But it's an improvement over looking at the phone awkwardly clamped to an air vent.
I suspect most people don't use most of the native manufacturer apps even if they sort of need to provide them. Aside from rarely changing some settings, my touchscreen is mostly just a screen.
That's because in car GPS tech has historically been absolutely atrocious. An example: 2008-2012ish Toyota Camrys had a GPS system that used a DVD for map data. Not only was it out of date immediately (and cost $150 per new DVD from the dealer), it was insanely slow.
Nowadays, there's a few companies that actually seem to do a decent job of GPS in the car itself: Mercedes has a good tech in their new EVs that seems smooth. Android automotive (not auto) cars have built in Google maps such as Polestar, the new Cadillac EVs, and some other Chevy products do well. Although it's not much different than just having an android phone with android auto. And, of course, Teslas own system which is all inhouse.
There's little reason to use a phone in the traditional phone holders if you own one of those cars.
My dad, who's a fairly recently retired techy, is the only exception I know. I'm assuming it's based on perceived safety and less need to take his eyes off the road.
Granted, he took a long time getting a smart phone because they weren't allowed in his secured office, while dumb phones with no camera where allowed longer. On the other hand, he's also automated his home (a few times with updates), so it's really the one weird outlier.
The backup camera screen compliance was solved early on by just putting a 2-3 inch screen in the regular rear view mirror. There's no legal requirement to make it a big screen in the dash, that is 100% a design choice by the manufacturers unrelated to the backup camera.
I learned that very thing setting up my home automation. I was originally planning on designing and printing some sort of button arrangement. But I ended up buying a bunch of cheap Walmart tablets.
Easy to set up and keep updated. But... I'm not driving 70mph when I'm trying to dim the living room lights.
Volvo, the vehicle company that started out making bearings, used to make a big selling point in the 80's about their knobs, switches and buttons were good enough for people wearing gloves in the middle of the Scandinavian winters and intuitively placed for drivers to use without taking their eyes off the road. Saab were the same, but fast forward to today and the lunatics are calling the shots.
Even the flappy paddle gearboxes still have a weakness, namely they dont have a clutch peddle to dip when the traction control/esp decides to have a nightmare and ends up trying to cause accidents, where oil, ice or snow removes the grip and temporarily freewheeling is the fastest way to get the vehicle back under control before reengaging the drive system.
And these tablets like displays ruin the night vision, I actually liked the old Saab displays where you could press a button and it switched the lights off to loads of buttons and gauges for night driving.
Cars have got noticeably worse with these tablet displays.
I took advantage of the used car market to upgrade my 2021 Subaru to a 2024 (same car, better trim), there's actually MORE physical controls in the 2024 - hope isn't entirely lost!
In my experience in the USA, most fast food restaurants in the suburbs give away sauces for free, but the ones in cities charge for everything. Seems to also be correlated with whether or not the fast food restaurant has self serve soda fountains versus soda poured behind the counter.
In Poland I've experienced both ones that charge you per packet, and ones where asking for a packet will have the cashier grab a bunch of them without even counting, give them to you for free, and move on to handle another customer.
That applies only to ketchup packs, though - they always charge for sauces. The only place I ever got sauce containers by handful for free was in a KFC in Shenzhen, China.
Dealership margins, as I recall, are 10-20%, also not great.
Mfg margins have come up during the pandemic, interestingly, but historically have been very low[1]:
> While estimated aggregate industry operating profit margins are 6 to 7 percent (Exhibit 1), large variations in profitability exists across companies. For instance, some European niche, luxury companies make double-digit margins more akin to those of high-tech players, while mass-market (or value-focused) OEMs make 4 to 5 percent.
Their margins being thin is a matter of perspective. Most farms are running 1% profit margins on average and have massive variations in yield that auto production lacks.
Automotive grade controls are pretty expensive (it's not unreasonable to expect them to be operative from -40 to 140f, UV resistant, dust and vibration resistant, etc.), and as with all hardware, BOM cost is king. Even if the button can be stolen from an existing design, it still costs real money, and adds manufacturing labor costs.
The button then has to be tested, and kept in stock for service purposes. What if the button has silkscreen printing on it? It might be the same hardware button for the traction control and the trunk open button, but now they are different SKUs because the label is different.
So let's say I can eliminate 10 $1 buttons (that is an extraordinarily cheap button) by moving functionality to a touchscreen that is going to be in the car no matter what. I reduce the BOM cost by $10 per unit. That's a bunch of buttons that also aren't going to have warranty issues either. The wiring can all go straight to the head unit in a single bundle as well, and there are ten less connections for the assembly line to make. If I do that on a popular platform like the Corolla selling 750k units per year, I have just reduced expenses directly by 7.5 million, plus the cost of install, and simplified the supply chain.
I don't have the source but I read that in the process of designing a car there are different teams that design outer look, inner look, the actual functionality and at the time of designing interiors it isn't known where or how many buttons you need.
By having a huge touch-screen instead of knobs there is much less need to synchronize between the teams because the inheritor design team just needs to place the screen somewhere. And it's easy to imagine that it can significantly shorten the time to delivery and the costs.
Buttons are not just design, it’s more parts and assembly. On the high end it’s also a “less clean” look, unless you’re high enough for truly luxurious buttons and knobs’ designs and materials to be justifiable.
In every single car I've been in, the touchscreens are optional and you have some sort of knob you can use. This requires memorizing where things are in the software, however.
Touch-screens can be updated later, meaning you can release the broken version first, then get it working after the money starts rolling in. Knobs would require they get it right the first time. The horror!
I will never buy a car that forces me to navigate a menu to turn on my windshield wipers...
Problem is, they don’t actually upgrade the touchscreens. At least not after the first couple years. And most consumers don’t/won’t know how to upgrade them.
I think a lot of people miss the obvious reason: it's cheaper. People seem to think it's some misguided attempt to make things better but really it's just that they've identified a way to cut costs.
The brands don’t often listen to their customers, all of whom clamored for this car ever since it was shown. It only appeared in the “Entourage” movie and it’s a beaut. Nary a single bad review on the entire Internet, but tons of people begging Chrysler to release it and sites devoted to pretending it came out.
Car guys — what is the closest car one can get to this today, in all of human history? Go to Cuba and get some gas-guzzling illegal convertible with tailfins?
And please — no recordings of our conversations and sex in the car so they can send it off to others!
>Car guys — what is the closest car one can get to this today, in all of human history? Go to Cuba and get some gas-guzzling illegal convertible with tailfins?
Maybe not Cuba, but there's a new car restoration series on whichever streaming platform, I can't keep up, that's located in El Paso, TX. They go across the border and buy older cars, then import into the US.
Fwiw, teslas support pretty much everything via voice. You just press the right button on the wheel and say what you want it to do. I’m not disagreeing with your dislike for touch screens, but Tesla can do literally almost everything hands free using voice if that’s an option.
I'm mostly fine with the Tesla approach. The few tactile controls are basically enough for me, especially with the last few updates effectively adding more.
However, the voice controls have been basically useless for me. I wouldn't want to depend on them.
It’s why things like the GR Corolla are nearly miraculous in 2023, it even comes stick shift only.