Is there anything wrong with loving stick-shifts?

There was a time when manual transmissions scored better MPG by the EPA than the same cars equipped with an automatic. The manuals where more efficient, but as automatic designs became more sophisticated and computers took over to optimize shifting, manuals lost their advantage. I could still beat the EPA city MPG by a fair amount in my old '91 Subaru Legacy by shifting to neutral and coasting to stops, and then keeping the engine in the power band while accelerating.

 

Cars of that era could have had higher emissions parked than today's cars on a cold start. Your father's car probably didn't have a cat back then.

Found a paper that measured cat warm up times. https://www.matec-conferences.org/articles/matecconf/pdf/2021/10/matecconf_itmts2021_00051.pdf

It takes 6 and a half minutes for the cat to reach operating temperature when everything starts at -30C. At 1C, it is just 1m40s. Once warmed up, a cat retains heat, thus the warnings about parking over dry grass. So heat up time on a hot start will take seconds, if needed at all.

Me and others have blanketed the engine bay during winter. I don't have a block heater, but it will help one get the engine warmer. A partial grill block, if the car doesn't have active shutters, will also help with heat loss while driving, in addition to the aero benefits.

Cat warmers are being looked into. A company is developing a self contained chemical one. There is also electric ones, that will likely see use as mild hybrids become the norm.
Hot catalysts make for a clean cold start | New Scientist

Before adding a neater on your own, look into the max temp a cat can handle. Something like a silicone mat that completely wraps it might add too much insulation. The cat may not be damaged, but efficiency could drop with too much heat.

Automatics got better through more aggressive lock up and DFCO, and the addition of more overdrive gears. The computers help, but manuals can do better on the EPA. They don't in the US because the manuals we get are geared for performance. In Europe, you can get manuals with the same gear ratios as the automatics, and they do better.

Once had a 2013 Sonic with the little turbo. The manual was better rated than the auto; both were six speeds. With the base engine, the manual did worse, but it had five speeds to six in the auto.
https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/Find.do?action=sbs&id=32598&id=32576&id=32691&id=32692

 

In the old days, the automatics had the same or worse gear ratios as manuals. Add in the lack of lock-up torque converters, and the manuals always won.

But once automatics starting getting taller gear ratios than manuals, allowing their engines to turn lower RPMs during simple easy highway cruising, they pulled ahead of manuals. The engines in manuals had to endure higher "pumping loss", a very significant energy loss mechanism of traditional (non-Atkinson-cycle) gasoline engines.

 

To the original question, no, I don’t think there is anything wrong with loving a stick-shift.
Likewise, I don’t think there is anything with loving a horse for transportation, or loving an EV for transportation.

Each have their pros and cons, and each has their own fan base.

 

Some manual cars had a shift indicator light telling the driver when to upshift.

Before the EV's return, most conversions were a DC motor mated to a manual.

 

My last Ford had that. Apparently it gave them a bit of extra MPG credit.

But some drivers needed a downshift light, to prevent lugging and seriously slowing down traffic on significant uphills. Especially with the smaller engines on 1980s econocars.

A coworker started commuting in one of those (a converted Escort?) back in the mid-1990s, prompting our workplace to install several parking lot outlets for EV recharging.

 

Isaac, I've never live in a climate as cold as yours, but would it be easier to keep the car in a semi-warm garage?

 

How can a person drive a manual transmission and never shift gears in over 3 year and 40,000 miles?

A DCT Dual Clutch Transmission.

All the advantages of a manual transmission with all the convience of an automatic transmission.

And if your that type of an individaula who likes to manual shift you can do that by putting it in manual mode - but the car will activate the clutch when you shift so that experience is missing.

Had not seen where this innovation in car transmissions was mentioned yet.

 

Does it easily pop into neutral for a low-drag glide too? And also for an instant reflexive and instinctive disengagement of engine power to wheels in case of Sudden Unintended Acceleration / runaway engine? There is very good reason why runaway SUAs are far less common in manual-clutch transmissions than in common automatics.

If not, then it doesn't have all the advantages of a manual transmission.

 

When I do my first EV conversion it definitely needs to be a manual transmission in order to know the most efficient use of the electric motor at various levels of battery charge. Then once I understand how that works It'll be easier to consider an automatic, planetary, CVT style.

 

Yes, there are DCT's that have a freewheel option for coasting.
But the downside of a DCT is that they tend to be less reliable than a manual or traditional automatic.

 

Yes, DCT would have automatic traction control, vehicle stability control, abs and some safety features I am probably overlooking. Can easily shift into neutral.

Even though I used to drive a VW and had a Chevy 1969 truck with a 4 on the floor H pattern shifter I am thankful to let the DCT do all that now. It would be a lot of fun to drive the stick with a manual clutch again for 1 day. I am not going to put up with manual shifting these days for any length of time.

I have no desire to put the DCT in manual mode but enthusiast of this sort of thing talk about being able to downshift on hills.
Some DCT come with 6 and 7 speeds.

They also come with automatic hill assist where the DCT is smart enough to hold the car on a hill when stopped with no human intervention and then take off when stepping on the gas.

Thought that might be interesting to some if you are not familiar with DCT's.

Here is a video on how a DCT works

Kia 7 Speed Double Clutch Transmission - YouTube

 

I think the point that a manual helps you learn about cars and how shifting works is well taken.

Would also think that is in the forgotten past - like how a rotary phone taught you how to dial or a phone party line taught you how communication was shared by everyone.

The DCT transmission takes manual gear oil, the same as a Manual transmission

How did you lose your brakes did you overheat them and they failed?

 

^THAT!
The R-car is a crowded segment for a reason......a BAD reason.
As dot.gov continues to squeeze the testicles of automakers to make small cars do big things, we'll continue to see egg-shaped cars with big mouth bass shaped plastic intakes, and "tramp-stamp" wings on the aft hatch that are about as functional on the street as insider trading laws are in DC.

Hot hatches aren't new.
Das Volksvagens builders have been warming up their Golfs since the 70's because (a) they're Germans and (2) US Pony cars with their large displacement V8s and RWD make about as much sense in Europe as Public transportation does in 99% of the US.
So....
The Japanese (being Japanese) saw that, and got the idea of taking a soulless, two-door, 5 pax commuter car and warming it up enough to also require some mild engineering tweaks, and then sold it for less than the up-optioned version of the same car, because they were already saving bucks by not having to mate the engine to an automatic.
The result was 90-95 percent of a similarly sized BMW (318i) for less than half the price, in a car that you still wouldn't be embarrassed to take to work once you graduated college and gave up the mall job.....other than it being a Sentra that it.

It was, literally, lightning in a bottle NOT because of the up-optioned BHP or the handling tweaks, but because it truly WAS a dual-hatted car. Driven sensibly, it would COMBINE near-BMW performance with near Sentra efficiency, and since US interstates were hobbled by a senseless 55mph speed limit at that time, they were driven MOSTLY sensibly.
Take a screwdriver and pop the SE-R badge off of the rear lid, and you're Clark Kent, rocking a newspaper gig......until.....

Speaking of which.....

Expensive.
And built to stay that way.....
Veloster performance and looks at a Golf-R price.

LOVE LOVE LOVE the idea of a 300BHP Corolla, but the $35-45K price leaves me wondering if Toyota's "me to!!!" R-type will be worth it on the street.
It's a shame they never considered the US market to be adult enough for the Yaris GR, whose turboed 3-banger is the mill for it's portly replacement.
Never been much of a fan of AWD but at least in an overweight compact, you don't suffer the embarrassment of making smoke on the wrong end of the car.