Learning to Drive a Stick Shift - Obtaining car?

Parent Cafe
1

I haven’t driven a stick for 30 years - and I drove one so infrequently then that I am certain the muscle memory will not be in place.

Here’s the problem. The car rental agencies near me seem to have only automatics. I don’t feel I can ask a friend, if anything went wrong, I would, of course, pay all costs, but the risk to a friendship is too high and I feel is just asking too much. I haven’t found a Driving School that has manual - the ones here cater to kids who can’t fit Drivers Ed into their high school schedules and are automatics.

Any suggestions?

2

That’s tricky. I know the Toyota dealership near me does rentals as I’ve rented minivans from them… Maybe they would have sticks to rent?

3

Go to a used car dealership and ask to test drive a car with a stick? For what it’s worth, I just got a car with a manual transmission after not having driven one in 25 years, and it came right back to me. Also, the newer cars have lots of tricks - mine has a feature that doesn’t allow me to roll back on a hill!

4

We bought our current used car at a great price, simply because it is a manual transmission and nobody wanted to buy it. :wink:

It is a wonderful driving car and my D and I prefer it over our automatic.

Call around to a few used car dealerships, see if you can take one for a test drive.

5

You will not forget how to drive a manual, but every car is a bit different to get just the right balance of clutch versus gas.

My sister has a diesel and it practically drives itself, rarely stalls. My dad has a very temperamental VW jetta and it needs a lot of gas and he still sometimes stalls it out. (They are all in Germany where an automatic is rare).

6

Ah , this brings back some unpleasant memories between my now 25 year old and me ….I had to teach her and it was awful !

7

“mine has a feature that doesn’t allow me to roll back on a hill!”

What fun is that? :slight_smile: I will always remember this one steep hill in San Francisco where there was a stop sign at the top. Talk about scary.

8

^that’s what the handbrake is for.

My dad made sure we practiced this a lot on hills.

9

It’s what happens after you release the handbrake that is the fun part. That hill must have been something like a 30 degree incline.

10

I’m bookmarking this thread as I have a similar dilemma, in that I’d like my daughters to learn to drive a stick but even if I rent a car that’s a manual, I don’t believe that teenagers are permitted to drive them. :confused:

11

I figured out the handbrake trick on my own. We have one hill in town where I often use it. At least when someone puls in really close behind me. No suggestions about who to ask, but I’d be happy to let a friend practice a bit on our car if they asked.

12

Thanks for all the discussion! It was suggested on another forum that I buy a used car. That might be a possibility down the road. DH does like manuals, it could be his car after our current 12 year old second vehicle is retired. We only need the second for close in driving. I never mastered hills - luckily, it is quite flat where I live.

13

Best way to practice on a stick is to ask around to see which friends/acquaintances own a car with one. Car enthusiasts are more likely to have them.

I’ve never seen a car rental place in the US that rents them out, and I would feel super weird asking a used car dealership for a test drive in one.

14

Why does anyone need to learn to drive a manual transmission anymore? It’s like saying, I need to know how to drive a horse and buggy.

My husband’s and my first car together(a pickup truck) had a manual transmission, so I’m not completely ignorant of them, just flummoxed as to why this even needs to be a thing nowadays?

15

^I believe OP is having a hard time finding an automatic to rent is the reason.

OP it’s like riding a bike. You’ll be ok!

16

Go to a new car dealer. I used to do that at lunchtime with my coworkers for a little fun.

17

@MotherOfDragons - I think it’s a good idea if you travel abroad a fair amount. Every car we have ever rented in Europe, Central America, etc has been a manual transmission. Our kids have expressed in interest in learning for this specific reason.

18

You never know in what situation you will be in where the only car available is a stick. Also, it is a good skill to have to teach how to properly drive and to pay attention to what the car is doing instead of being distracted by the phone, radio, texting, etc. Manual transmission cars are also not desirable by car thieves, especially teenage joy riders.

19

^Agree with NoVaDad99. Also, car enthusiasts like stick shifts because you can control the car better and interact with it more intimately. Another thing is that standard transmissions are much simpler and cheaper to repair than automatic transmissions.

I drove a standard for years and wish I had a car with a standard transmission now. One of my sons still has an old Honda with a standard.

20

Manuals are getting rarer and rarer, even in europe these days automatics have become a lot more common (many of them are kind of a manual-automatic hybrid, where you can shift the car using paddle shifters, or allow it to work in full automatic mode, no clutch). That said, in many places outside the US if you rent a car, it could be a manual.

I miss driving a manual in many ways, when my wife made me get rid of my nice subaru wagon (she called it disreputable), I cried. There are advantages to manuals over automatics, even with the CVT automatics and with automatics with computer controlled shift points, manuals get better gas mileage. On bad road surfaces, with a manual you can slow a car down without using the brakes, using sequential downshifting, in general with a manual you have more control over the car. It isn’t as great as it once was, back when your typical automatic was a land yacht, the differential was greater, these days with the automatics in cars, and with the improved suspensions and steering and AWD, it probably matters a lot less.

I don’t know of any rental car agencies that rent manuals, other than some types that rent sports cars or classics. It is very hard to find a manual these days, they don’t offer it on a lot of models any more (I find it amusing that when you look at the sticker price of a car, they still consider an automatic transmision an 'extra", given it is standard on about 90% of cars these days.

I suspect you will find you never really lose the ability, I drove a manual the other day and it was no big deal, even though I haven’t driven a manual in a while. One of the things with manuals is I drove a wide range of cars, from econo buckets to high powered muscle cars and sports cars, and they all drive differently, so it gets ingrained on how to approach driving a manual transmission car. Personally I think all kids should be forced to learn to drive a manual, if only to understand a bit of what is going on when they drive it, so it isn’t turn the key (push the button) and go, same way I wish they would teach kids the dynamics of driving and how a car is put together, so they will realize what can go wrong and be a little more careful. I realize that as time goes on, if auto driving cars become the norm, it won’t matter any more, but until then, would be great if they did know.

As far as teaching someone to drive a manual, I grew up on manual cars (we had a couple of Alfa spyders and a manual transmision wagon), we didn’t have automatics (friend of mine claims I was the only person he knew who could stall an automatic). Anyway, when my wife and I were dating, I taught her to drive a manual on one of the Alfas, that had one of the trickiest clutches to use I have ever driven, it engaged roughly and you had to feed it the gas just so. She claimed that I was trying to torture her and secretly wanted us to break up so did that to get her to do the breaking up, until she realized that people who own Alfas torture themselves:)