How many of you know how to drive stick?

Go get the Camaro and turn it into a project car dude! Everyone needs a hobby.

It's harder for me to drive an automatic because I always want to slam on the break thinking it's a clutch.

I always drove a manual car... until I had a baby, lol

I wonder why the difference is so big. Everyone drives stick shift here. You can't get a driver's license driving automatic since it is not considered knowing how to drive. Of all people I know for my entire life, there has been automatic among them twice only.

It's great you are learning...practice, practice, you will get it! I drove a manual for years. I think it is good to know how to do both.

Naaa... get somebody to teach you heel & toe and rev matching. That's when it get exciting When I first got the 6 speed I was a little scared of using 6th gear. Had this irrational fear I was going to shift into reverse accidentally
Drive thru restaurants can be a little tricky in a manual.

Love to drive stick shift, most of the time. One exception comes to mind, on very steep hills, with cars behind me.

JadeAmethyst.....I was just going to comment on that (stopping on a hill).....I remember while my dad was still teaching me driving the stick shift on the California I5 Freeway in the San Fernando Valley (during traffic)....the off ramp happened to be rather steep (at least for a beginner). I got up to the top & it was a STOP LIGHT .....I had no idea how I was going to get going again without ending up at the bottom of the off ramp again.....but I looked back & there was a whole string of cars behind me. My dad solved the problem. He put on the hand parking break while I was doing the clutching to get it going he was letting up on the break....I think I killed it a couple of times before getting going as there were a bunch of honking cars behind me.

With practice, I learned how to sort of "ride the clutch" on hills like that so it didn't go forward or backward.....just took me time to figure it out.....not a good solution for the clutch but I didn't have that many hills to deal with in that area of Calif & most offramps level off at the top.....think I was just so panicked that time since it was my first experience on a hill......Hey...give me San Francisco now.

I doubt I will ever afford another vehicle but I would definitely look for a stick shift.....however with my truck & hauling a horse trailer, there are times when I need to focus on the trailer & glad I don't have to deal with stick shift even though I truly love it much better than automatic.

How do you quickly accelerate an automatic transmission? I mean it can't know you suddenly need a boost of speed so how do you do it?

The first car my sister bought was a stick and she did not know how to drive it. So my dad took her to a loading ramp and she had to learn real quick or hit the dock.

I learned in my teens. I had a friend who's mom grew up on a farm. There was an accident and the only vehicle there was a stick and the person did not know how to drive a stick. So her parents made sure that all of their kids and their friends could drive a stick in case of an emergency. She even made her kids take their driving tests in a stick.

We used to have a jeep. I loved it.

Automatics are the work of the dark one.

It is easy, first gear for one car's length, 2nd until you can shift up into third. In third you can generally ease the car along in urban areas and in traffic, coasting in third with the gas off (modern cars cut off fuel when the gas pedal is up, see I am making it easy for you - the gas peddle is really the accelerator) so you are not burning excessive gasoline, correctly styled petrol. Fourth is for cruising at about 40-50, after which you can change up to fifth (and then sixth if you have one) to cruise at higher speeds. When you slow down again you change down gear by gear. You can miss out gears under some circumstances but that is usually the province of the heedless, better to keep full control of the car and protect the transmission.

You can select a low gear to retard the car down steep hills but it is better to use cheap brakes than expensive transmission if you can.

It is essential to practice clutch control for hill starts and slipping the clutch to keep control in very slow situations. But it is not difficult.

Remember to put the car in gear when parking on a hill so it cannot run away.

Coasting in neutral is not advised.

I KNOW!!! Automatic drivers will tell you that you just punch the gas. And this is true. But if you will allow me to emphasize the dynamics we, as stick drivers, are speaking of to any who might not have experienced the difference...

We want to pass on the highway, yes? Shift, dropping into lower gear and give it the gas! It is one of the times you will truly know how much it kicks *** to drive a stick!! The power is there already -- built up to obey your command that instant.
YOU are telling the car what you want. DIRECTLY. NOW.
You are in direct communication. No delay.

No waiting for your gas pedal to nudge awake a slow-witted translator to the transmission. In fact, it's one of my big peeves with automatics. That pause waiting for the transmission to clue in. It may not seem like much to those used to automatics, but to a stick driver, it feels like an eternity. (And passing on an uphill, the difference in response is enormous!)

Stick shift wins on passing. Hands down! It is the BEST!!!!!

To the OP -- it is worth learning stick for so many reasons. An additional set of skills, being ready for any sort of occassion or emergency if the available car is a stick. You are ready for anything!
(Not to even mention better gas mileage, better handling, lower price, easier repair....)

P.s. Maybe this sounds weird, but I can feel "at one" with a car while driving. I cannot imagine having this feeling with an automatic. Too uninvolved and unresponsive for that. JMO.)

Who made this thread? (sry, i just found this 'cos it's got bumped by Innerzone who if I remeber correctly, that drives an old beater that I think is not quite road worthy.... )

It's a toy and not a toy. I do not own a car any longer and I so miss driving a stick shift. It doesn't matter how many gears/speeds it's got. You feel that you're in control, and you got to be. Don't talk while I'm driving, I'd tell you that it's my responsibility to take you from point A to point B, safely. But the truth is, I do my driving for my own enjoyment.

hmm?? (I'm reading the post above only partially..)

On any cars/auto mobiles, what you might wanna do is to choose the lowest gears and floor the gas pedal.

Feel the HORSE POWER!

Things I want to drive:
A horse buggy, a modified lawn mower thingy, a match box car, and a biggest muscle cars you got. Someone someday needs to teach me how to do donut in a parking lot.

I'm glad that I've found this thread. I'll be subscribing and reading them all later on.

Now I'll be driving off into the sunrise(it's morning here) with a looong skid mark left behind me,,only in my imagination. (Save gas when you can, walk if you can afford it.)

Haha, Takeshi! Good memory! It is roadworthy though (emissions test and everything) and runs just fine. It's quite a sight on the outside, though!

(You might want to add dogsled to your list. THAT'S fun! )

It's fun when you are young. When you get up in years your left knee starts to hurt and your right arm starts to complain. Then you say let the damn car to the shifting. They cost too damn much have me do extra work.

I can drive a manual, but they are rapidly going the way of the Dodo bird. Take super cars for instance, Ferrari no longer offers a manual trans in any of its cars, ditto Lamborghini. Porsche you have to special order certain versions of the 911. The reason is technology the 488 GTB's dual clutch for example can move between gears in mille seconds faster than any human hands and feet unless your name is Lewis Hamilton or "The Stig". These new DC trans are way some of these cars are now down to the three second range from zero to 60.

In midsize family cars only the Mazda6. The Honda Accord and the Ford Fusion offer manual transmissions. In compact SUVs only the Mazda CX5 and Subaru Forester offer 6 speed manuals and only on the base models.

The other reason people used to get manuals was fuel efficiency, but that is no longer the case either. I have a 2016 Mazda6 Automatic, it beats its manual counterpart by 2MPG and it is a 1/2 second faster from zero to 60 to boot.

the other thing is the American life style, we talk on our phones and eat our Mac-muffins going down the road in the morning. We need that free hand

Soon none of this will matter, Autonomous cars are the future, in 20 years, driving will be done entirely by enthusiasts on tracks out in the country side.

I can drive both. It was fun to drive a stick when I was a kid. The last 2 cars I had were automatics. Now I am too lazy to drive a stick.

I found that hauling my loaded horse trailer & truck with stuff from my friend's storage unit, I would have really LOVED to have had a stick shift. I was hauling the things up into the mountains & I was constantly having to drop the automatic down into 1st & maybe if lucky 2nd to make the pull. There were times even in automatic that my truck would roll backward on the slope & I didn't have the clutch to help me out with it. Always wanted to learn how to drive an 18 wheeler with all their gears. Thought it would be interesting.....even though I wouldn't have wanted it for a full time job, it doesn't mean I wouldn't want to learn how to drive it.....just like I would have loved to learn how to drive a race car on a race track.....LOL....there are times I practiced on the open road anyway.

I can drive a stick - one of my favorite cars I had was a Celica GT 5 speed. It had 165,000 miles on it when I sold it to a coworker for a bottle of bourbon.

I loved my Supra 5 speed......that was a really nice car until my H totaled it running it off the road on a rainy day not making one of the curves. Interesting though, it was a heaver weighing vehicle than our Jeep Cherokee....but for me it hugged the road so nicely. My H was a terrible driver & totaled more of our cars.....got so I wasn't willing to let him drive & made him buy clunkers for himself.....it was the only kind of car he deserved to drive.