What I learned from my pole

[forgotten_aria]

Is that 72% of the people who could drive stick, prefered to drive stick (for a long time in the pole it was closer to 85%) which actually surprised me. I'm also surprised that ~75% of you can drive a stick. I thought it was more of a dying skill than that. Thank you lj friends, I learned something.

Comments

Another fun fact...

[bikerwalla.livejournal.com]

Almost every motorcycle has a manual transmission; automatic is viewed as an assist for people who can't shift with their left foot anymore.

Re: Another fun fact...

[forgotten-aria.livejournal.com]

I thought that might be true, but since I know so little about motorcycles, I just thought I would be inclusive. In the modern age I also figured anything was possible.

Learning to drive a motorcycle is on my list of things to do.

Motorcycle Safety Foundation

[bikerwalla.livejournal.com]

Courses held by the MSF will give you a solid grounding in cycle ownership and riding skill. It's two nights of lecture, and two full weekend days of riding, with their motorcycles. It was free too; the courses are paid by the state learner's permit fee. In mine, they even provided the helmet; all I needed was the rest of the gear (jacket, jeans, boots, gloves). At the end of it, the MSF instructor gave me a riding test, and I got my Pennsylvania "Class M" driver's license.

Re: Motorcycle Safety Foundation

[katybeth]

Free depends on the state, but the rest holds.

[bdeakin.livejournal.com]

I'd have been interested to know how many years continuous experience people actually have driving stick. A lot of people claim to drive stick, in my experience, and then when I got a little drunk and asked them to drive for me... well, the stalling caused me to throw up in my own car.

True story. Times two.

[katybeth]

I've learned to drive stick, enough that I could do it in an emergency, but I'm not comfortable with it. I also passed the MSF class, but don't drive a motorcycle. So I didn't check either of those boxes.

[zkzkz.livejournal.com]

To be fair it's not so easy to get into an unfamiliar manual car. I typically stall an unfamiliar car once or twice before I get accustomed to a new clutch. That's especially true if you haven't driven one in a while or if the new car is markedly different.

[plymouth.livejournal.com]

I recently borrowed my boyfriend's brother's subaru after driving no sticks except my VW for the past 3 years. I didn't stall it but there was a definite moment of "wow, the clutch engages REALLY low!" and "hmm, the engine sounds unhappy. Oh, I guess it wants me to shift up into 2nd sooner!"

[plymouth.livejournal.com]

I pretty much only let people drive my car who I know OWN sticks. Except for a brief period of trying to give my boyfriend lessons (he learned back in high school but hadn't done it in over a decade so he had forgotten almost everything). But I found that really stressful so we stopped.

[brass-rat.livejournal.com]

I don't know about any of the other stick shift drivers, but for all intents and purposes I learned to drive in one. I drove one regularly for several years until I went off to college. I drive them rarely (but not never) now, because I don't own my own car. However, my bicycle is also a manual transmission, and I pedal that regularly. :-)

[zkzkz.livejournal.com]

I think it was a dying skill but seems to have made a bit of a come-back.

[dcltdw]

A friend of mine says that control freaks drive stickshifts.

That's certainly true of her, and to a certain degree, me.

So perhaps your poll is really "are you a control freak?".

Then again, using this same whacked logic, I could easily argue that your poll is asking "do you like playing video games?".

Oh alright, alright, I'll go back to debugging this sql procedure... :)

[katybeth]

I'll bite. Do manual- or automatic-transmission drivers like playing video games? :)

[dcltdw]

*grin*

Wait, I grew up in LA, driving an automatic. But does it count that I often had my left arm out the window waving the gun around?

[forgotten-aria.livejournal.com]

I drive a standard because my mom did and because I like having things to do while driving.

I'm not sure I can answer "am I control freak?" I definately like having more control over my car, but I'm also not one to seize leadership because I'm unhappy with how it's going.

[gorgo.livejournal.com]

It doesn't surprise me too much that most of the people who know how to drive a stick shift say that they prefer to, since learning how to drive stick is pretty optional these days.

I don't know how much the "control freak" argument is valid. My impression is that preferring to drive stick correlates with enjoying the process of driving as opposed to viewing cars as boxes that are only interesting because they take you where you want to go.

[forgotten-aria.livejournal.com]

I think I'm in the "cars take me where I want to go and lug stuff around" you must admit, I have a pretty frumpy, low end car right now.

[76trombones.livejournal.com]

I have the same impression, though I both drive stick and view cars as boxes for transport (best used when the big shared boxes don't go where I want, or take too long to get there).

[zkzkz.livejournal.com]

Actually it occurs to me I can provide a bit more insight to this. Since the UK licensing authority doesn't believe me that I can drive a manual they gave me an automatic-only license. So I got a car with flappy paddles that lets you select the gears, though it's really a CVT automatic transmission beind the scenes.

So the interesting information I can provide is how often I switch it into the fake manual mode and how often I leave it in automatic mode. And the answer is that I do switch it to manual mode about half the time.

I typically don't push it into manual mode until I get outside of the stop-and-start residential streets, and if I'm distracted, such as trying to navigate or talking to someone then I typically leave it in automatic.

On the other hand once I'm on a through road I usually get annoyed at the automatic mode and switch it over to manual. It's things like releasing the gas and having the car continue coasting just as fast, or pulling out to pass and pressing the pedal down and feeling the power drop for a moment when the automatic gearbox downshifts until the engine speed can come up. It's not the delay exactly, it's just that it feels like the car isn't connected to my foot.

A lot of this depends heavily on the type of transmission though. This isn't a particularly good semiautomatic and the gearbox is a CVT so it's probably a lot less responsive than a good auto gearbox.