Some cars have been sold with a large metal shifting stick in the center console and a third foot lever intended to decouple engine power from the drivetrain. Very few people in the U.S. automotive buying market ever figured out what these strange pieces were intended for, and as a result never bought them.
What I wanted to know was simple: how to drive a manual without breaking it, since repairs are expensive and every piece of advice I got was b.s. So I called up a rally champion and found out what will actually blow up your car in the space of an afternoon, and what will keep it running just about forever.
Nashville police arrested two teenagers last Wednesday, after a press release from the department said they attempted to carjack two women that day. The statement said the teens ultimately failed both times, with the second being because the car had a manual transmission. They had to run away on foot.
Brandon is 31 and has always regretted not learning how to drive a manual transmission. He wants to get a cheap, fun beater with three pedals to learn the skill that many of us cherish so much. What car should he buy?
I was tipped off about a very exciting and rare car available on Craigslist, and the unnamed tipper wasn’t wrong—this thing is an absolute unicorn. It’s also exactly the kind of car that, if you find it interesting, will make you realize just how deep down the automotive rabbit hole you’ve fallen.
“Is engine braking with a manual transmission bad?” you might ask your disinterested friends at lunch. Well, Engineering Explained has an answer for you! In his newest video, Jason Fenske goes over not only what engine braking is, but also whether or not it’s bad for your car.
A manual transmission, by definition, is a wobbly stick with a lot of choices. Most of the time, you just approach those choices in the order they appear on the wobbly stick, but sometimes you need (or want) to skip around the gears. Here’s how to do it without completely ruining everything.
I’m pretty sure that none of our readers who drives a car with a manual transmission has ever looked down at their shifter and exclaimed “I sure wish this was a hell of a lot more complicated, needlessly!” I’m pretty sure. I can’t say the same for some Toyota engineers, who have patented an electronically-controlled…
A college student in Columbia, South Carolina was kidnapped by three men at gunpoint. Fearing the worst, she used some Jason Bourne level-problem solving and her manual transmission car to get away safely.
Driving stick is something my mom said is a nice skill to add to the Toolbox of Life. My blog boss said it’s good to know because, hey, maybe you need to drive the getaway car one day, and in this hypothetical, the getaway car has a manual transmission. But I first learned how to drive stick in the early hours of Nov.…
Few subjects are as sore among the Porsche faithful as the company’s refusal to put a manual transmission in the current 991 generation of their mad track weapon, the 911 GT3 RS. Now one heroic owner is doing what Porsche should have done from the factory by putting a manual transmission into his own 991.1 GT3 RS.
BMW is looking to save some cash as it invests in electric, hybrid and autonomous vehicles. To do so, Reuters reports, the company is going to drop manual variants of the BMW 2 Series, one of Jalopnik’s favorite cars—which seems like the opposite of getting their mojo back. But BMW’s U.S. spokespeople dispute the…
A man in Alabama allegedly stole a Kenworth T-300 flatbed truck, and led police on perhaps the most pathetic police chase in history. All because he didn’t know how to operate the manual transmission.
It’s 2017 and the number of cars that come with a manual transmission is falling by the wayside. There’s also a new Toyota Supra coming—which will most likely only have an automatic. You didn’t think there would be a manual offering, did you? Oh, you did. That’s sweet.
When Porsche confirmed that the 2018 911 GT3 will indeed come with a manual gearbox, we were all very excited about a car that most of us can’t afford. The only problem is that Porsche is going to charge you the GT3 premium for what should be the cheaper gearbox.
Have you ever had an idea so comprehensively and impressively terrible that you can’t even believe it was generated by your brain, instead of some other organ not known for making humans smart? I have. Lots of times. Like right now, with this idiotic idea I had for autonomous cars.
Right after Porsche got our hopes up by adding a manual transmission as an option for the 2018 911 GT3, their head of GT cars brought us right back down by saying that six-speed won’t be used in the more hardcore GT3 RS. I thought you understood us, Porsche? I thought we had a thing?
Damari Wayne reportedly got away with his first two carjackings. His third would’ve gone the same way, if it hadn’t been for the car’s meddling three pedals and stick shift.
We already know which one is supposed to be more “fun”, but what do the innards of manual and automatic transmissions look like? How do all the parts to together?
As many drivers know, reverse is the car gear that lets you drive backwards. That’s a fact. But different manual transmissions have different locations for reverse! Which way is the right way?
