Learning to Drive a Stick Shift - Obtaining car?

RenaissanceMom
Fri, 29 Jan 2016 02:12:08 +0000

The cars my husband and I have owned for ourselves (3 between the two of us during our 30 years of marriage because we buy and then own for years) have been manuals. We both like being able to control the car, particularly in bad weather. It’s a lot less dangerous to downshift on ice and snow than it is to brake. But we bought an automatic when our boys got their licenses. We felt that we wanted them to learn the rules of the road and how to drive in general before having to learn how to operate a manual transmission. Well, one is 22 and the other 19, and neither has yet driven our manuals. There is a driving school nearby (we’re in westchester, NY) that offers manual lessons. At some point, I hope they learn because my mom lives in Italy half the year and when we visit, we rent a car and manuals are a lot easier to come by.

Just as an aside, every parking garage in NYC that we’ve used has attendants that drive manuals. And I can’t tell you how often we’ve been asked by parking attendants if we were willing to sell our cars.