I am teaching child #4, the youngest and only boy, to drive.
Up until this point my default method has been to cover the basics in an automatic transmission, then introduce the wondrous learning curve of stick-shifting later.
But with this kid–for a variety of reasons, but mostly because he tends to be differently-abled in the common sense department–I’m taking it as a slow, probably year-long or more, odyssey from introduction to license.
So, I figured why not start out in the manual transmission Soobie from the get go?
Well, I’m sticking with the approach, but now I have clearer notion of how the various psychomotor skills of driving intersect.
When your first driving experiences are in an automatic transmission vehicle, you can put more immediate effort into acquiring a basic feel for how the car moves…what is a good turn radius…when should you slow down relative to a turn.
When your first experience is stick, it seems that the clutch/accelerator play takes so much concentration–at least at first–that some of the gross motor skills (so to speak) may be ignored.
Hence we are more inclined to have close encounters with curbs and stop signs in the Community College parking lot (virtually empty on weekends,) because of our determination to go from stopped to first to second with no lurching or stalling.
I must say though…from that standpoint he’s doing remarkably well, and much better than his sisters did on their first several tries with a clutch.
It’s just that before we go out again, I’m going to draw a diagram of an ovoid driving track with lampposts around which you must steer at each end, and try to explain how it’s advisable to stay in one’s lane while approaching the turn, rather than steering toward the lamppost.
When I learnt to drive the instructor sat me behind the wheel for the first lesson, strapped a pretend steering wheel over the actual on and we just sat there practicing for half an hour how to steer properly and how to change gear. Then we had a very slow, very short drive out a country road and back.
I think if the ultimate goal is to drive a manual transmission car then starting on an automatic can only lead to bad habits. Start them on a manual from the get go and then the whole clutch thing will be second nature in no time.
The best of luck to you and your boy, and maybe you’ll be able to find ibuprofin on sale in large quantities to aid in relieving your sore and tortured neck and shoulders.
Well, that was my thinking.
But I did successfully teach the 3 girls post-automatic. Thing is, I pretty much made them learn. The first one was cool with it, the second 2 fussed.
“WHY do I have to drive THIS car? None of my friends have to do this!!”
But I persisted. And they learned. Mostly because that was the car available to them to drive, and that’s generally incentive enough.
Now they all prefer manual transmission and are glad they drive one.
That was the case with the girls (and with me when I learned.) But, amazingly, the kid is barely lurching at all, and has stalled about once in 2 lessons.
I learned on an automatic. Then I’d sneak out in the manual Fiat after school before my parents got home. As far as my father was concerned, I made remarkable progress learning the stick.
Now 30 years later I’m in my first automatic car. I love it in the DC traffic, but I hate everything else about an automatic.
I’ve driven a manual all my life, except for hiring an automatic when I was in Kentucky.
So when I used the “clutch” foot, what I hit was the brake. I’ll stick to manual if I can.
My Mother took an immediate right turn when told to “turn right at the end here” on a family driving lesson. It took her through a chain-link fence and into a stream.
After that we used driving instructors. It was more expensive, but cheaper in terms of keeping the family on speaking terms.
My parents hired someone to teach me how to drive. I was 18 at the time and didn’t have much enthusiasm to learn how to drive. It was on an automatic because that’s what my folks were driving.
A few years later I got a job and had to learn how to drive my husband’s car, a manual, in 3 hours before my shift at work started that night.
It was a red 69 Volkswagen Micro bus. I could reach the gas pedal by stretching one leg out but in order for me to clutch and brake I had to jump up and stand, sometimes jump up and down on the pedals to get them depressed.
(I’m rather short and yeah, no safety belt laws yet.)
Three nights into the job we all decided to go out to “lunch” (2 AM) together. Since I had the hippy bus it was decided I’d drive.
I got them all to the bar, but they all walked back to work afterwards
by their own choice.
I’m also in the process of teaching both daughters (an 18-year-old with a year of experience, and a 16-year-old with none) how to manage the clutch and stick. Whole lotta lurching goin’ on.
One of them is thrilled (she has her sights set on somehow wresting the '67 beetle away from Mom), and the other one says I’m torturing her, and she will never, ever, ever own anything but an automatic.
I think if I had tried to learn a stick shift when I first learned to drive, it would have been too much to learn all at once. I recall that when I was first driving on the road, with my permit, I found it stressful having to simultaneously roll down the window while driving. A clutch would have been too much.
My son is not yet 10. At the rate things are going, I wonder if he will ever drive a gas vehicle, or if his first vehicle will be electric? He might never experience the clutch. Heh… except in videogames, I suspect.
I agree. I put my mother through the windshield of our ‘60 VW microbus, no seat belts. But after that I learned quickly and I taught all my siblings, none of whom did to me what I did to our mother. My youngest sister, a Luddite, didn’t learn how to drive until after college and getting a job that required her to drive to work. She failed the drivers’ test three times so in desperation I borrowed an automatic from a friend and she passed with flying colors. Now, however, she is the only one in the family that still uses a stick and tries, but always fails, to buy cars without radios
I agree, and have one for the same reason you do. I generally prefer the stick, but there are times when my knees (which have put up with the weight of 4 pregnancies) just don’t feel like doing the stop and go traffic thing.
I started out driving with a 1951 Nash with an 87 horsepower engine and a standard transmission. The gear shift lever was on the steering column. I got a 1965 VW beetle when I graduated from college and bought one of the first Honda Civics (1973) with the “larger bodies”, driving several hundred thousand miles with a manual transmission.
However, for the last 20 years I have been a happy convert to an automatic transmission. I think that automatic transmissions make a lot of sense, especially in stop and go traffic. I think that cars with automatic transmissions are safer cars because you have two pedals to manage instead of three. You might get better mileage with a manual transmission car, but you really need to watch the tach and shift correctly. I see a lot of people diving a car with a manual transmission that shouldn’t be doing so because they don’t understand what they are doing. You can hear the engine connecting rods pounding away because the gear is too high for the slow speed. My mother would drive up to a stop in high gear every time. Another extreme is when they rev the engine too high in a low gear. These people would be much better off driving a car with an automatic transmission. And, for me, there is no way that you could entice me to go back to a manual transmission. All of that clutch work is too hard on my back, for one thing. I wonder how many people are still using the old rotary dial telephones? Not many, I bet, because the touch tone phones are so much easier and faster. Now I don’t have to dial at all; I just tell the computer voice inside my cell phone to “call Rita”.
Don’t know if it’s still the case … But a few years back it seemed most rental cars in western Europe used to be manual transmission unless otherwise specified. I’ll bet many a US tourist ended up flummoxed and having to scramble for a different car. On a few visits I ended up as the designated driver because I was the only one who could operate the available vehicle.
Once, a friend of mine was injured on a day outing and needed an emergency ride to hospital in his Sunbeam Alpine. If I hadn’t been able to drive it, the story would have had a much less happy ending.
Apart from the joys of heel-and-toe power-drifting around corners just to freak out other annoying drivers , I can think of many reasons that knowing how to drive a manual shift is a good thing.
LOL! I was the designated driver in Ireland because I am ambidextrous. My wife couldn’t in a million years drive a stick shifting with her left hand.
I had no problem sticking lefty, but twice pulling out in busy intersections, I pulled into the right lane, right into the oncoming traffic. Both times were from car parks, so I just pulled back in again.
I learned to drive an automatic first, then straight shift. Like Doug’s, this was on the steering column of my dad’s truck.
I taught both my girls to drive a straight shift but not before they could drive an automatic. In fact daughter #2’s first vehicle was a stick shift pick up because we needed a new farm truck. This was nerve-wracking because we have a LOT of hills to pull out from and lots idiots who insist on pulling up on the rear bumper of the vehicle stopped in front of them. There’s rarely much room left for rolling back around here.
For many years we only bought straight shifts because that way we could afford air conditioning- the price of each was about the same.
There’s no way I’d ever go back to driving a straight shift unless I just had to. I can do it, but I don’t want to.
Em, you have my sympathy. You know, in thinking about teaching driving, my worst student was my dh. I taught him to drive when he was 50. Now that was an experience!
This kind of situation is exactly why I want to learn manual when I get the chance. Some friends from university and I went out for mini-golf a few years back. One of my friends, who happened to be the driver of the manual jeep that got us there, suffered some back spasms bad enough that he couldn’t drive. None of the rest of us new how to drive a stick. We had to call one of our moms in to drive the jeep back.
Even if you never plan on owning a manual transmission car I think it’s a useful skill to have.
, I can think of many reasons that knowing how to drive a manual shift is a good thing.
Now that was an experience!