Shifting gears by hand - a soon-to-be-forgotten art
11/25/2012
Sometimes even the most mundane journey in an older car becomes an experience and you enjoy even the smallest and most trivial actions. One of these manual activities is changing gears. Whether with or without intermediate throttle, shifting the gear lever gives you direct access to the mechanics of the car. You can feel in your fingertips how the gears mesh, how the synchronizer rings work.
However, this "art" will soon be a thing of the past, because fewer and fewer cars are being equipped with manual gearboxes, DSG and automatic transmissions are gaining the upper hand, and electric cars usually do not need a gearshift by default.
It's a shame, because shifting gears by hand is fun, even if it is slower and perhaps less perfect than what hydraulics and computer control can achieve today. And our descendants will look at a lever sticking out of a gearshift gate with similarly wide eyes as they look at the dial on an old telephone set today.
