I still remember the first time I watched it. It was approaching
midnight on a late August evening, and I was a passenger on a two-birds-with-one-stone
trip to Minnesota. I was onboard a very old Freightliner cab-over fleet-truck,
sitting on a barely-there bench seat, hugging the doghouse. The Freightshaker had
been made into a potato hauler by having the frame stretched and a
self-unloading bed installed.
I don’t recall how many shifts I watched as we jolted along
abandoned highway in North Dakota that cool night, but they were all double-clutched,
smooth as glass and accompanied by the bellow of an 8V Detroit through a
straight-pipe behind my right ear. He was a second cousin and had a hard
lifestyle, but the man was an artist with that Roadranger. Now there are videos
of the art-form on Youtube, so you can spare your back and your hearing if you
want to learn about it.
Through high school and college we all played with cars. I
honestly didn’t know anyone who couldn’t stir their own gears. The hotrodders
among us still preferred a stick. The automatics were getting better and
faster, but a sharp hand on the end of a Hurst T-handle could bang gears so
fast you’d swear it was an automatic, and the sticks seemed quicker. That may
have only been perception, but in, errr-ummm, street racing, perception is half
the battle.
Into my Autocrossing days, stick shifts once again reigned supreme.
On the track the stick allowed the car to respond instantly to your throttle
foot. There was no lag; you thought it, and it happened. It helped the melding
of man and machine. The stick-shift was also a must in the tow vehicle. While
even then an automatic could fail less frequently than a clutch, a burnt clutch
was a whole lot easier and cheaper to repair:
$125 and 3 hours under the truck
in the driveway.
As I became seriously involved in business transportation, I
started becoming aware of how few light-duty drivers really could grasp the
stick-shift (pun fully intended). Not a formal survey by any stretch, but it
seemed out of every 100 operators 20-30 could shift their own gears in a pinch,
but of them only 15 seemed proficient enough that I would trust them daily with
a stick.
In a light duty fleet, stick-shifts are anathema to dependability
and trends are heading that way in heavy trucks. Every fleet manager
understands the repair bills and downtime he is committing to if he deploys
stick-shifts. I eventually saw the stick-shift drop off of our preferred manufacturer’s
available options list about 2008-2009.
The domestic manufacturers toyed with continuously variable
transmissions (CVTs) for a while, but the American buying public avoided them
like the plague. Buyers couldn’t “feel” shifts like they had for years.
Today even pickups have a button on the gear-stalk that
firms up the shifts and raises the shift-point. Manufacturers call this a “tow”
setting, but as the same technology is turning up in cars as a performance
setting, it sort of throws a bone to old-school hotrodders. These automatics have
higher power-input ratings and more gears than they’ve ever had before. They
are more efficient, longer lasting and offer better performance and economy
than ever in history.
We joke in my neighborhood that you don’t need an alarm on a
car with a stick. You can even leave the keys in it, because no one knows how
to drive it anyway.
My son just bought his first car with his own money, using his
own legwork. A 1991 Mazda Miata. It has a 5-speed stick.
© 2014 D.W. Williams
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