LEN BURNIE, Md., May 26 — With a wicked grin slicing his jaw, Curtis
Preston, 38, turns up the ramp to the highway. Wham! He crushes the
accelerator to the floor and holds it there. With his left foot, he pounds
down the clutch. With his fist, he slams the gear shift into second, then
third, then fourth.
The engine howls, then wheezes, howls and wheezes. In six seconds of a
heavy-metal symphony of muscle and motion, Mr. Preston's red 1986 Chrysler
Laser hits 60. In 14 seconds, he goes a quarter of a mile.
"When you used that clutch in my '61 Impala, you ended up with a calf
that looked like Popeye's," Mr. Preston said. "I believe that rolling a
four-speed is an art form. It's something you have to think about. It's not
God-given."
But the Laser with its manual transmission is a 20th-century artifact,
and so might be most rubber- peeling Popeyes.
The true clutch-equipped, stick- shifting manual transmission — even
today called the standard transmission — has shrunk to a mere toy. Six
decades since the debut of the Oldsmobile Hydra-Matic, the demise of the
manual transmission has accelerated, forced along by stop-and- go highways,
brutal commutes, hard- to-handle cell phones and, most recently,
make-believe five-speeds that do not even have clutches.
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Alex Brandon for The New York Times |
| Curtis Preston of Glen Burnie Transmissions in
Maryland, behind the wheel of his 1986 Chrysler Laser, says driving a car
with a stick shift is "an art form." |
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"I wouldn't say it's necessarily our objective to phase out the
stick," said Matt Kester, a spokesman for General Motors Powertrain, the G.M. division that makes
engines and transmissions.
"It's a cultural issue," Mr. Kester said. "It's just that much more
work" to operate a stick shift.
Other developments are undermining the stick. Cars with automatic
transmissions usually cost $500 to $1,000 more than stick-shift cars, but
that gap is shrinking. And manual transmissions used to be peppier and more
fuel efficient than their automatic counterparts. Now, automatics, governed
by sophisticated computers, are burning gas more wisely. "That fuel economy
penalty is largely disappearing," said Paul Taylor, chief economist at the
National Automobile Dealers Association in Washington.
Hertz, Avis and National no longer carry cars with manual transmissions.
State motor vehicle regulators do not require training in stick shifts, and
high school driver education programs do not offer it. Some driving schools
do, but they charge a premium for it.
At the extremes of the marketplace, the $9,000-to-$15,000 bare- bones
low-powered cars and sporty $40,000-and-up high-performance road burners,
drivers can still readily find manual transmissions.
But by last year, according to Ward's Automotive Reports, manual
transmissions accounted for just 8.7 percent of cars made in the United
States, down from 12.4 percent in 1996.
Two decades ago, 20 to 25 percent of all new vans had manual
transmissions, the Environmental Protection Agency reports. Now none do. Ten
percent of sport utility vehicles have stick shifts, compared with 40
percent of similar vehicles in 1975. Throaty Mustangs, Camaros and Trans
Ams, a new Lincoln LS and a Volvo V70 have them. But they have disappeared
from popular full-size cars like the Ford Taurus and the Pontiac Bonneville
and from all Buicks. Last year, Chrysler dropped them from the Jeep
Cherokee.
Curt Preston works at the mid- Atlantic's high temple of transmission
service and repair, Glen Burnie Transmissions, a 40-year-old business on
Ritchie Highway in Glen Burnie, a suburb south of Baltimore. Chain operators
like Aamco are bigger, but Marvin Keyser, 72, the owner and co-founder, says
his suppliers tell him the shop, with its 24 bays and 50 mechanics, is the
biggest in the nation under one roof.
The mechanics here say an automatic is still no match for a stick. "You
can keep control of the power better," Mr. Preston said. "You can use the
engine to pull it down" — slowing the car by shifting to a lower gear rather
than relying solely on the brakes and wearing them down.
"They also last a lot longer than automatics," Mr. Preston said. Repair
usually entails little more than replacing a clutch, at a cost of $100 to
$300. Today's much more complex electronic-controlled automatics require
more work, typically costing $900 or more.
But cars with manual transmissions have declined to less than 4 percent
of all those the shop sees. Even the mechanics here prefer automatics. Only
10 of the 50 drive stick shifts. One of the two who specialize in servicing
sticks, Jack Bell, drives a Ford 150 pickup with an automatic
transmission.
Until he bought that, he said, "I had three or four cars with sticks."
But on the highway outside Baltimore, he said, "they're terrible."
"You go two feet, push the clutch, go two feet, push the clutch," he
added.
The dominance of automatic transmissions is an American phenomenon, Mr.
Kester of General Motors said. They have captured only 12 percent of the
European market. Europeans drive cars. Americans eat, drink and live in them
during ever- longer commutes. They also talk, and the impossibility of
shifting, steering and dialing a cell phone has further imperiled the
stick.
"The European mind-set," Mr. Kester, "is A, you can't get good mileage
with an automatic, and B, only weenies drive them."
"I don't want to be stereotyping," he added, "but Europeans prefer the
acoustic acceleration experience, whereas for Americans the big selling
point is a quiet car."
Stop in the automobile dealerships stretched along the six lanes of
Ritchie Highway, and you can feel the stick's doom. One dealer carries the
Kia Rio, a bare-bones Korean car, with a manual transmission. But it appeals
only to the thinnest wallets. It gets 32 miles a gallon on the highway, and
at a price of $9,390, less a rebate of $500, it is the cheapest, and
sparest, automobile in America.
To shoppers who come in looking for manual transmissions, Rick Melzer, a
salesman at Bob Bell Ford, which also sells Korean Daewoos, said:
"First I would say, `Why do you want a stick?' Sticks are popular with 16-
and 18-year-old kids." But mostly for reasons of economic necessity. The
least expensive car Mr. Melzer sells is a Daewoo with a stick, which goes
for $9,900.
At Tate Chrysler Plymouth, nearly all the 40 Jeep Wranglers have manual
transmissions. Jack Hodges, a salesman, attributes that to the car's unique
appeal to young buyers who drive them on beaches — and also to their price,
typically below $15,000. But once buyers get older, and are able to afford
more expensive machines, Mr. Hodges said, they are happy to leave the stick
behind.
He cites Chrysler's PT Cruiser, a nostalgia car with a big toothy grill
and boxy rear that would not be out of place in a 50's drag race.
But there is a limit to consumers' retro impulses. The Cruisers have
been flying out the door, except for one. "It's a stick shift," Mr. Hodges
said, "and the only reason it's here is that it's stick shift."
Crouching like a tiger in the showroom's prime spot is a car that does
have a manual transmission — of sorts. It is a $47,000 midnight blue
Chrysler Prowler, a descendant of the low-slung hot rods that had manual
transmissions. In a cruel twist, though, the Prowler is equipped with a
technology that could spell the end of the true manual transmission.
The gearbox looks as if it has a stick. But the car has no clutch.
Drivers can push the stick from gear to gear, allowing them some of the
control of a manual transmission, but they can also slip it into automatic.
And if they rev it up too high, the automatic kicks in and slows the engine
down.
This is what Chrysler calls the AutoStick, introduced five years ago and
now appearing in the company's Sebring and Stratus lines. Over the last
three years, all the German cars have introduced variations — even
Porsche, which stunned the
hard- driving faithful three years ago when it introduced something it calls
the Tiptronic. It is now offered in Audis and Volkswagens.
"What you have is a clutchless, driver-influenced transmission that you
up- and downshift with the press or a button and movement of the shifter,"
explained James Sanfilippo, executive vice president of Automotive Marketing
Consultants in Warren, Mich. "At first, dyed-in-the-wool Porschephiles
wouldn't have it. But they're finding it a joy to drive."
Mr. Sanfilippo calls these transmissions "manumatics."
Now they, too, have a challenger. In its new and highly fuel-efficient
Civic HX, Honda has introduced the "continuously variable transmission."
"You get no sensation at all of gears changing," Mr. Sanfilippo said.
For all that, said Mr. Keyser of Glen Burnie Transmissions, there will
always be a place for the manual transmission. "You'll still need them in
the bigger trucks," he said.
