<p>We had drivers ed in school so most of my real learning came from that but I practiced in the HS parking lot which was conveniently across the street from our house. My first car was a 1963 VW bug and I think I taught myself to drive stick shift on in the same parking lot. The only problem was that I grew up in lower Delaware and never saw a hill until I went a couple hours away. No one had told me that you have to down-shift when you go up-hill! That was a little scary.</p>
<p>High School Driver’s Ed for round one…my instructor would have us stop at a local bakery for hot chocolate chip cookies. 
A few years later my husband taught me to drive a stick on the hills of Manayunk, PA and in a big parking lot in South Philly. The first week was not pretty. It is only recently (because of sciatica) that I have not had a standard transmission car.</p>
<p>My folks just let me drive the family car everywhere we went. I did have to take Driver’s Ed so they could get a better insurance rate for me. I learned to drive a stick a year later in Denver during rush hour. I was visiting my sister over the summer, and she told me I could have her car for the day if I could drive it. I cheerfully assured her that I could and did a decent job of driving her to work. On the way back to her apartment I ran into some trouble. Got stuck at a major intersection, couldn’t find 1st gear, and managed to lurch my way through it - bringing many smiles to the faces of all those folks sitting at the intersection watching me. The embarrasment was worth it. I love driving a stick and had a clutch in my 2005 Honda CR-V. (It was demolished in a 5-car crash, but that’s another story.)</p>
<p>mollie - I lived in Boston for 3 years and loved the T. While it’s certainly useful to know how to drive, if you don’t have occasion to do so regularly there isn’t much point, IMO, in learning, since passing a driving test and being a good, competent driver are two different things. For the latter, you need at least 6 months of near-daily driving (or at least, I did!)</p>
<p>I have nightmares about driver’s training! I had never so much as stuck a key in a car and ended up taking driver’s ed with the farm kids who had been driving since out of diapers…I was so intimidated. Falled the first time and had to take again. Passed the second time, got my license and promptly quit driving until I was in my mid-twenties. Long commutes to work and living in the car state have definitely “honed” my driving skills over thirty years, but I still have nightmares about drivers training.</p>
<p>My mom taught me to drive in her stick shift VW van in the Rose Bowl Parking lot. There were several other people cruising the parking lot that day with leashes hanging out the windows, “walking” their dogs.</p>
<p>I learned to drive in my driver’s ed class. I still remember the instructor’s name…Mr. Pel###, who chain smoked and refused to turn on the heat. He intimidated the heck out of the 4 of us in that car every Saturday morning for several weeks. He always admonished us to “cover the brake” any time we drove through an intersection. I yelled that same phrase to my kids when they were first learning to drive.</p>
<p>I learned to drive a stick when I bought my first new car. It was a 1980 Honda Accord hatchback that only came with manual transmission (not that I could afford automatic). My boyfriend, now husband, had to test drive and drive the car off the lot for me. I had to learn to drive that car very quickly. I lurched and stalled my way into the office the next day.</p>
<p>The car I learned to drive on was a garbage truck - honest. I was fifteen and had a summer job as a sort of maintenance man’s assistant at a vacation resort. One of my duties was to go through the campground twice each day and empty all the trash cans. One day there was no one available to drive the truck, so the supervisor just tossed me the keys.</p>
<p>Later that summer I set the truck on fire when someone discarded their burning charcoals in one of the cans and I unwittingly dumped it into the truck. But that’s another story.</p>
<p>I learned to drive at 23 from a driving school. I guess the instruction was good enough since I passed the driving test on the first shot. I grew up in NYC & neither of my parents drove, so there was no reason nor opportunity for me to learn any earlier. I still prefer public transportation & walking in cities.</p>
<p>A year after I got my license, my new husband & I bought a new car with a stick shift, so I had to learn to drive that. After some scary (& teary) moments on hills, I manged to learn how to drive that car as well. Those experiences came in handy 3 years ago when I taught S2 how to drive a stick. Yes, I still drive a stick all these years later.</p>
<p>I learned to drive in Driver’s Ed with a screaming passenger in the back and a chain-smoking instructor half-asleep in the front seat. Not a good experience.</p>
<p>After my brother got his learner’s permit, I took it upon myself to drive him to the nearby college campus over winter break when it was completely deserted… My parents were still under the mistaken impression that Driver’s Ed would teach you everything. I taught him how to walk around the car and check the tires, make sure everything was copasetic, told him to get in the driver’s seat and taught him how to shift through the gears. We drove a few times around the parking lot so he could get a feel for the car and the steering. After he was comfortable with steering and switching between the brake and the accelerator, I demonstrated a panic stop, then we swapped out and I had him try one to see how it felt. We drove around the campus, and I had him change lanes using his turn signal and checking his blind spots, and execute left turns and right turns, and by the end of the day, he was at least proficient enough not to freak out when he had to get behind the wheel in Driver’s Ed.</p>
<p>In 2004, my husband retired his long-since-mufflerless '92 Dodge Shadow (Betsy) when he landed a graduate stipend big enough to cover buying a “new” '99 Toyota Celica convertible (ooh baby!), and he only drives stickshift. We took the opportunity to run Betsy’s clutch into the ground and spent a day teaching all our friends how to drive a manual. One of our friends taught me, and my husband taught our friend’s wife. That way, we wouldn’t kill our respective spouses. ;)</p>
<p>I remember some of it was taught in high school. My girlfriend also took me to a parking lot and taught me how to drive stick shift. My brother taught me how to drive non-stick shift. But it took me 3 tries to pass, so I now sent my daughter to driver’s ed instead. It was much smoother for her, she passed on her first try.</p>
<p>^^^
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<p>This makes me laugh. H (also an engineer) tried to explain this to D (an engineering student…sigh :rolleyes: ) as he was explaining how to drive. She stared blankly. Then, he proceeded to show every guage, including the temperature guage…she asked if it showed the inside or outside temperature.</p>
<p>We had only standard transmissions when I learned to drive. My dad would take me out, and bring me to the hilliest back roads in town, and every so often, on the way UP a hill, he’d say “STOP”. That’s how I learned to start on hills. But…I’m very good at it!! His favorite saying, whenever I was going too fast (which was often, given how many times I heard it) was “EASE UP, OKAY?” Makes me smile to think of that.</p>