The aural pleasure of a pinned throttle ebbs as you look through the next turn. Just past the hero point you prod the brakes, bringing weight onto the nose and shifting grip for that rotation drivers live for. Deftly, your foot rolls to blip the throttle while the other simultaneously disengages the driveline from the motor. One hand leaves the wheel, pulling the gear lever from third to second as tho…
*CRUNCH*
Dammit.
You rushed it into gear. What, you don’t like your synchros? Cause they sure don’t like you right now. It’s ok. Slow it down, take a breath, and we’ll try again in the next corner…
Picture yourself in an E92 M3 with a Dual Clutch Transmission (DCT), is the above possible? No. What about a Mitsubishi Evo X with a Twin Clutch SST? No. A Nissan GT-R? Nope. How ’bout a Porsche Cayman with a Doppelkupplungsgetriebe? NEIN.
There are enthusiasts who believe that “automated manual” transmissions are basically the same as those that require three pedals to get down the road. These people are wrong. While the main difference to someone who doesn’t care is that the clutches are no longer pedal-actuated, this was always the line between automatics and actual manual transmission.
As someone who has never owned a car with an automatic transmission, I make a point to correct someone whenever a dual clutch is referred to as a “manual.” The first response I usually get is, “but you can shift it manually.” The next and most ridiculous counter I hear is, “it’s faster, so it’s better.” The latter is missing the point, literally side stepping the manual argument by shouting shift times. While today’s DCTs shift faster and can bring your lap times lower than any three pedal car, pulling a paddle for a gear change has all the involvement of grabbing the column shift on your aunt’s four speed DeVille and yanking it from D to 3.
I’ll write it clearly so it’s understood: Sheer speed is not engaging.
When the average person talks about “better” newer cars with all manners of magic traction-nannies and double-clutch gearboxes, what they’re trying to relay to you is the excitement of the driving experience. The infallible launch control, the imperceptible upshifts, the thrust that brings you beyond sane speed and into the ever climbing accelerative abilities of contemporary cars; all of this comes together into a climax of speed and temporary movement. There are those for whom this excitement is all they want from a car. Whether it’s whipping on the freeway, ripping up a fast-paced backroad, or showing their friends how well the computer blips the throttle, this is all they want or need. But this is not engagement.
Engagement is more than the back straight, and it’s more than the 0.00.53 seconds a dual clutch knocks off your lap time. Engagement is about feedback, it’s about how the car reacts to your inputs, which means it’s about making mistakes. It’s about the ability to have a negative effect on the lap time, the exit speed, or the car’s overall attitude when navigating a corner.
It’s even about scratching a downshift in the canyons.
Some will concede driving a traditional manual takes skill, then quickly gloss over it by talking about dual clutch lap times, or other stopwatch porn as if that had any lasting effect on the driving experience. But unless your car splits its time between a race track and the team trailer, those numbers mean nothing.
You wouldn’t want the brakes to balance the car, or the steering to track the perfect line, or the throttle to open at the corner exit if you didn’t direct them to. So you shouldn’t want the transmission to hit the perfect gear change without you making it happen. Otherwise, you should stop driving and invest more in autonomous cars.
Exciting cars are all around us, flooding the market with countless choices to get your rocks off with this one car that’s faster than this other car with that car’s powertrain or another car’s technology. But this rush for the fastest vehicle around a track whose name you can’t spell is burying the appreciation of cars you can engage with. Cars that are designed with drivers in mind, cars that teach you, cars that involve you.
The final death of the manual will mean the death of sports cars. If the Ferrari 458 Italia or Porsche 911 GT3 are anything to go from, the concept will certainly outlive the clutch pedal. But the final nail in the coffin for the manual transmission will be the first nail for the final resting place of driver involvement.
We’re losing more than a pedal when you remove the need to actuate the clutch manually. We’re losing an integral point of communication between driver and car. Without having to row your own gears, we lose a skill that helps define a good driver. And whether or not we ask for it, the industry is already speeding toward a world where the remaining acts of driving will be anachronisms.
Infiniti is hard at work improving their Direct Adaptive Steering system, a literal Steer-by-Wire system to remove wheel control from your hands. And as cool as the Lotus’ Race Mode or the Ford Focus RS’s Drift Mode are, the rest of us are all too cognizant of the computers increasing control on how we, the drivers, drive.
That third pedal stands as a reminder of what it means to really engage with a car. When the last manual flame is extinguished from the sales floor, you can bet the other control points will follow soon after. If the only time you spend in the car is from home to the office, understandably you’ll welcome this. The same for any millennial that’s never bothered with owning a car, let alone a vehicle that doesn’t do everything for you. And again for the folks aging out of the physical ability to safely drive from Point A to Point B.
But for everyone else? Be mindful of the substitution of technology for engagement points. Soon you’ll only be engaging with memories on a screen.