Manual transmission is the norm outside of the US

I daily a manual and this is a braindead take

If you don’t push your vehicle with your own physical strength, you can only suggest/“point” a car

Look at this amateur with power steering, automatic choke, and an electric starter.

If you’ve never used a hand crank to turn the engine over, you’ve never really started a car.

Ill upvote since the amish feel if you don't use a harness you are just letting a machine drive.

If your car is not drawn by animals, you are not driving it. You might be piloting or controlling it, but not driving it.

Not an unpopular opinion, just gatekeeping.

Pfft, amateur.

If you can't manually adjust ignition timing and air:fuel ratios you can't really drive a car.

Oh, we’re gatekeeping driving?

If you can't shift gears faster than 120ms you're inferior to the automatic already.

You think f1 drivers are fucking around with a clutch? Get off your horse and realize everyone and their half siblings have moved on.

This is from a crusty guy who taught many a fine lady how to drive the ol stick shift. That was such a great pickup line.

Driving has to involve a clutch? I'm very confused by this. Manual driver btw.

I'm about as big a car enthusiast as a person can be. I've built everything, rock crawlers, drag cars, drift cars, and road race cars. I've had lowriders and lifted trucks. I've owned automatics, 4, 5, and 6 speed manuals, 3-speed column shift manuals, cvts, an electric car, and a push button shifted Chrysler imperial. I've driven cars, heavy machinery, boats, planes, and even a hovercraft one time.

While I love my manual cars, to say a person can't drive until they learn to operate a manual is one of the dumbest opinions I've ever heard.

I’ve driven both extensively and you know what? I’m down for an automatic transmission and turbo in city traffic. I’ll reconsider a manual if I move out to the sticks again.

This is kind of, by-definition, wrong, not just unpopular.

For the simple reason that even though I only tried to learn manual once, I can drive any electric car without issue.

Hell even before that, some people could drive trucks or buses or motorcycles, but not all people with driver's licenses could.

If we came up with a different word for driving other types of cars, then it would make sense. But we didn't, so driving just refers to the broad concept of operating various types of motor vehicles, usually at relatively high speed, but not exclusively.

And that's quite frankly because even without manually operating a clutch, driving is still a huge skillset that most people struggle to excel at.

Where is this unpopular, America? That's just a fact.

If you've only ever operated fuel-injected vehicles then you don't really know how to start a car

You kids and your horseless carriages

Just for kicks I'll throw in my unpopular opinion: "If you have to use 1st gear then you don't know how to drive manual"

I never drove a vehicle with automatic transmission, so I'd like struggle with it until I could finally make sense of how it works... But when it comes to manual transmission, every vehicle I once drove and am currently driving had/have manual transmission, with some brands having different ways to actuate the backward movement.

Also, besides two cars I once rented, practically all the vehicles I'm experienced at are old (before 2010, including having driven a very old VW Beetle sometimes). The two, "modern" cars I rented (Renault Kwid and Citroen C3) were awful to me, even though I'm quite young and accustomed to tech, those cars felt more like toys than actual cars (clutch isn't connected to the transmission and accelerator/gas isn't connected to the carburetor , pedals felt like a frickin joystick, car's starting engine isn't connected to the key system like in old cars, panel looks like a damn Christmas tree with all the blinking LEDs, every command is "decided" by the embedded computer).

Given how I'm totally unaware of how exactly an automatic transmission vehicle is supposed to be operated, am I also someone who "can't drive, only suggest/point a car"?

!unpopularopinion@lemmy.world

I haven't driven the newest vehicles, but you can have control over an automatic and where it shifts. And I'm not even talking about the shifting selector, but how you give it gas at certain points to trigger the shifting pattern. Do many people drive like that, probably not, but it's not the machine that determines the driver.