S'long Stick Shift. Are We Slipping Out of Gear?

Via Facebook and Google Images

By Fred Bruning

July 26, 2026

War, pestilence, greed, Canadian wildfires and now comes word from the Washington Post that stick shift automobiles – those beloved “manuals” – are all but kaput, sales way off, drivers not willing to do the hard work of moving a lever and depressing a clutch, preferring, as one auto expert said, to consider the car a sort of living room where chatting on the phone from a plush bucket seat matters most.

“The more the car becomes your couch, the less you’re going to want to shift your gears,” Ivan Drury, of Edmunds, the auto research organization, told the Post.

There is perhaps unintended wisdom in Drury’s observation – more evidence that we’ve gone around another cultural bend also indicated by men who wear loafers with no socks, women’s jeans that come with holes in the knees, pre-fab s’mores and individuals who double park outside Starbucks awaiting Americanos and sugar-free vanilla protein lattes.

Am I right?

Not even 1 percent of cars for the U.S. market are stick shift these days, the Post reports, people want ease not adventure, and while it doesn’t make sense to draw conclusions, let’s do it anyway, and ask if we’ve become convenience junkies, disinclined to yank on a pair of socks, wear out a pair of dungarees, roast marshmallows over the campfire and, for Pete’s sake, stow the SUV in a parking lot before shelling out nearly five bucks for an iced caramel macchiato.

Nag, nag, nag. What’s the use?

I learned to drive on Dad’s second-hand 1951, pea soup green Ford sedan which he kept in a garage around the corner so it shouldn’t get hit if a trolley derailed outside our little Brooklyn apartment or one of us kids put a baseball through the windshield.

The shift was on the steering column and with the help of Dad, and an older friend, Rich Moller, I got the knack pretty quickly which is saying something because I am a notoriously slow learner, legendary, check with the faculty of Brooklyn Technical High School and mournful editors from my early days as a reporter.

(“This is the worst lede I’ve ever seen,” confessed an exasperated overseer at a newspaper out West, lamenting the first sentence of a story. At an East Coast publication, another superior put my dispatch aside, rested his head on his desk, sighed wearily, and moaned, “I guess no Pulitzer on this one.”)

In Dad’s peppy old Ford, I wheeled around Brooklyn with friends, out to Riis Park in summers and Coney Island, and, rarely, over the bridge to Manhattan, almost surely without my father knowing because, as he saw it, leaving Brooklyn for Manhattan was no different than setting out for Nome, Alaska, or someplace south of Tijuana, high risk proposition.

Best was yet to come when, first married, Wink, my wife, Jersey girl who could handle “a manual,” bought a compact Ford station wagon, bronze, and settled briefly in Colorado, the Ford heading up what was then a gravel highway to Pikes Peak – 14,115 feet, 156 turns, no guard rails, don’t look down! – and then a succession of VW buses, red, blue, and finally a cream-colored camper that we took to the Pacific Coast with our four kids in the back asking in New Jersey if we had yet reached California.

Those VWs had tiny air-cooled engines, maybe 60 horsepower, and labored so much on inclines that we needed first gear on hilly sections of the Pennsylvania Turnpike and, when hitting the Rockies, thought the kids would have to get out and push. “I think I can, I think I can, phew, I knew I could, I knew I could.”

Now I drive a Honda Fit, 2012, gray, stick shift. Lovely car, 100,000 miles, never fails me. Putting it into first, slipping into second, third, fourth and, finally, open road, finding fifth (!), plenty of oomph, takes me back, all right, heading for the horizon, VW buses, the kids already impatient and we just passed Perth Amboy.

They don’t make the Fit anymore. Not enough demand. SUVs took over. Stick shifts on the way out, too. Soon we’ll all have driverless cars, I suppose. Excellent, all right, comfort, convenience, sit back, relax, ain’t life grand on the couch?

Medium.com via Google Imates

Previous Invisible Ink posts at: https://fredbruning.substack.com/archive