Not seen this topic discussed much before, so I thought the article below was worth a read (see extract and link below). All my daily driver 'family cars' have been Autos in recent years but I do also still have a manual 2002 R50 MINI and of course a manual classic Mini. However more and more younger people I know passed their test in an auto and are unable to drive a manual, even if they wanted to and apparently only 14% of new cars sold are now manual.
Manual cars make for better drivers - (Sean Thomas - The Telegraph 4/8/2026)
"Not only is driving a manual more intense, it is also, in some ways, mechanically superior: lighter, simpler, cheaper to fix.
On top of that, manual driving is way more cinematic. Consider Steve McQueen rattling the gearbox like a machine gun in Bullitt, or the Minis snarling through Turin in The Italian Job, or the Sweeney doing doughnuts round the London docks.
And yet, despite all this: manual is dying. This week’s figures show nearly 30 per cent of British driving tests are taken in automatics, up from 4 per cent in 2008. Manuals accounted for 55 per cent of new cars sold in 2019. This year, they account for less than 14 per cent. A generation is acquiring licences that legally forbid them from driving stick-shift.
Soon nobody will know the tiny, garlanded triumphs of the gearbox: the perfect hill start, the double declutch, the snarly machine obeying hand and foot in concert. Instead, we shall glide about in humming pods that bong at us to have a coffee, or stay in lane.
The loss of the gearstick is also a parable. As machines take over human tasks, we will forget how to do them. Think how calculators killed long division. Think how sat nav killed map-reading.
Next, self-driving cars will kill driving altogether, and after that AI will take over the maths, the writing, the coding, the music-making. The machines will be better and we will turn into purposeless blobs. It’s not an appetising prospect, so I intend to resist. Tomorrow I’ve got a Mazda booked on a car share, for a run to the garden centre. If you see some delusional old geezer racing around Crouch End, madly shifting gears like he’s North London’s McQueen, that’s me."
https://archive.ph/qFoac
