Here’s a question: If you take a boring car — like, say, a 2005 Saturn Vue or a 2010 Ford Escape — and you add a five-speed manual transmission, is that still a boring car, or is it now legitimately cool? In my opinion: It’s now legitimately cool. Hear me out.
Back in April of last year, I wrote “I Can’t Stop Obsessing Over These Two Manual Ford SUVs: Which Is The Better Buy?” One of the vehicles I was obsessing over was, somehow, a Mazda Tribute:
But this wasn’t just any Tribute, because behold:
That’s right. It’s a Mazda G5M-R five-speed stickshift bolted to the unkillable MZR engine! The tan interior, the stout powertrain, and that stick — it turned an otherwise boring machine into something cool!
I feel similarly about my diesel, manual Chrysler Voyager. Am I remotely interested in second-gen Chrysler minivans? Not really (I’m a first-gen fan). But you throw a stickshift in there (along with a diesel), and now it’s a seriously a cool machine:
What about this second-gen Ford Explorer. Kinda boring, right?
But oh wait, we’ve got a Mazda M5OD!
What about this Ford Aerostar that was the inspiration for this article? Folks on Facebook are going crazy over it right now.
Surely they wouldn’t care if it were just an automatic Aerostar:
But behold; the M5OD makes yet another appearance!
How cool!
What do we think about this Mazda5 minivan?
I think it’s fine. Not really all that interesting to me, except!:
A five-speed minivan! That’s legit!
I think PT Cruisers look cool in their own way, but would I ever buy an automatic model? Never, ever. In fact, with an auto, I don’t find it remotely intriguing. But slap a stick in it:
I’d totally roll in a five-speed PT Cruiser!
To me, a stickshift can make the difference between cool and wack. It’s partly because on many cars, the stick removes what can be a major/expensive failure mode, and in part because it makes the vehicle more engaging to drive. What do you think?
Photos: Craigslist
Manuals are cool because you can still get going (with the assist of gravity and/or some pushers) when you have a dead battery or a bum starter motor. Ask me how I know.
Been there, done that.
Who hasnt?
My battery died in my 2016 Civic 6MT when I was parked at the top on a hill. The stupid electric parking brakes on modern cars need battery power to release! I had to wait for a tow in 100 degree heat and so I never got the chance to pop the clutch.
The electronic parking brake (EPB) in my 2013 fails in a painful way too! If it fails in the locked position, the only way to unlock it is to put up on a lift and then use a special, very long tool to reach in and crank it until it unlocks. 250 times. Too few? Won’t release. Too many? It breaks!
I realize that people who live in areas where salt is used on the roads get stuck when the parking brake cable rusts and seizes but I miss the actual emergency brake handle. Plus you can’t do a handbrake turn with an EPB!
Not just salt/rust. You park a car you’ve been driving in slushy snow with the parking brake on, it’s very possible for it to freeze on. It’s why I was taught to never use the parking brake in winter, just park in gear, so I’ve just never used the parking brake (except to do handbrake turns, or if I had to leave a car in neutral for some reason).
I prefer the handle too- having it sized is a huge problem!
Hard agree. I borrowed a Suzuki Esteem from a friend for a few weeks. Had a stick. Was glorious. I also drove an auto V10 M5 for a while. Kinda meh and tasted like the sadness of what could have been
Even a beige Sebring? I’m not convinced.
Have you driven a manual beige Sebring? I would wager that you’d get into it.
Absolutely agree. There’s a ton of cars I would own with a manual that I wouldn’t touch with an automatic. May Craigslist never takes away the manual/automatic filter.
I am worried that Craigslist will someday get rid of that…
As a Scotsman of a certain era (Baby Boomer) I have made the change from manual to automatic as I got older. I’ve owned loads of hot hatches with 5 and 6spd boxes but after trying a Steptronic 8spd auto in a BMW then leasing a Tesla for two years I am now an auto convert.
When I was a kid autoboxes were awful things, some only had 3spds and you could suffer whiplash when the box decided to shift up or down, they were notoriously slow and quaffed fuel like a rampaging Viking, or to put it more accurately, like a Scotsman out for a good sesh. They were crap in the snow and on ice and they depreciated faster than a lead balloon. The only place they shone was in heavily congested city streets where they spared your left peg from constantly engaging and disengaging the clutch.
The Tesla was an absolute dream to drive. Sure it wasn’t as engaging as a manual but it was one pedal driving in town and you only switched pedals on the twisty stuff. The Steptronic box offers semi automatic driving through the paddles or knocking the gear selector back and forth which kind of makes up for the loss of fun where the manual truly shines.
I recently drove an OPEL GT, sold in the US as a Pontiac and a Saturn that had a cracking 5spd manual box, in the Tramuntana Mountains in Mallorca and I had a blast in it. Because of the roads you couldn’t kick the arse out of the car but that gearbox was amazing. My only initial complaint about it was that I thought the clutch pedal was placed a little too high but I soon compensated for that.
I can see where Dave is coming from when he talks about a manual on a van. Driving a rental van makes me feel like a trucker especially if the stick is on the floor rather than just off of the dash. It is a more complete experience rather than making the van feel like a large hatchback.
So, that’s it, maybe I prefer automatics because I’m older and lazier but enjoy the occasional drive in a manual for purely sentimental reasons. Or, it could be that I’m riding the crest of a technological wave and I’m as cool as fork! Who knows? Who cares?
I had a manual Aerostar in high school. Many one-legged burnouts and field donuts were the result. Miss that van.
My first car was a 1986 Plymouth Voyager with a five-speed (no turbo unfortunately). What was basically a very boring, underpowered, family hauler was absolutely elevated by that stick shift. For cars without much power, the manual makes them actually fun to drive as opposed to losing all the horsepower and gas mileage in a mushy automatic transmission.
Unfortunately, it blew a head gasket at like 80,000 miles and was never the same after, great American 80s quality.
Today, all four of my vehicles are automatics, and it’s kind of driving me crazy to not have a manual to play with.
Because autos are inefficient and waste power, autos are not an option on underpowered cars imo
Depends on your definition of cool. I drove a Corolla with a stick and it was fun and more engaging but it wasn’t very cool. However, when I gave the car to my kid for her 16th birthday, it was suddenly cool again. She thought it was cool and I thought it was cool she wanted her first car to have a manual tranny. Cool.
Just drive enough of them, and you’ll prove yourself wrong.
Stick shift is fun, but glorifying it and idolizing it doesn’t do it good neither.
In 1993 I was crossing Romania with a friend, with a Renault Traffic and a Citroen BX 14TRS that had about 300000 miles between them. He was driving ahead, I was following.
We got lost into some concrete jungle neighborhood somewhere and had to make a 3-point U turn in a dead end. He did, and drove off.
I tried to put my Citroen in reverse, and realized that the stick was hitting my seat in its movement to the left.
So to shift in Reverse, I had to slide my seat all the way back, move the lever to the left (by which time it was going IN FRONT of the seat), engage Reverse, do whatever maneuver I needed to do, shift back to first, reposition seat so I could actually drive.
By then, my friend (a paragon of attention to the world around him, as it turned out, as by this time he had lost me for the second and not last time), had driven off into the sunset.
Along with both cars’ papers, the cans of gas which we needed to cross the country because gas stations were in crisis or whatever, the maps (no gps back then), and all the cash (credit cards were not really a thing there).
I had on me 20 French francs, my pasport, and a French police report for my stolen driver’s license that had been stolen in Paris previously (along with another 20 franc bill 🙂 ). And about 1/4 tank of gas.
So I drove out of the city (I believe it was Craiova, not exactly a small city, about 250000 population) to see if he’d be waiting for me at the exit. He wasn’t. Went back, got pulled over by a cop. He was much more impressed by the Police report than by any driver’s license I could have shown him. He fined me my second best Jimmy Hendrix tape, for good measure. Still can’t get over it.
I found another exit with some half-rusted road sign pointing to Bucurest, and there was my idiot friend, smiling and giggling and asking me where the f# I’ve been. We lost half a day and I won my first gray hair.
So a stickshift is not always the most exciting of things, unless you’re driving along with a very smart person who doesn’t care about reality that much. THEN it gets really exciting.
PS: Said Citroen was a blast when driving ladies around though, as the driver had an excellent excuse to touch their knees when shifting in anything above 2nd.
That was a roller-coaster from start to finish.
A good old (disengage the engine) clutch is a useful extra layer of control in winter driving. I say it beats “AWD” anytime in emergency manoeuvres and skid control.
I prefer a manual, not because it’s cool (although it is), but because it’s a more intimate connection between me and the car. I’m selecting the revs and deciding upon the amount of clutch take up to desired effect. I can “feel” the engine, sense the tire grip, I’m part of the machine, not merely a passenger. It’s the difference between driving a buggy and being a jockey. I’m Steve McQueen in the “The Sand Pebbles” down in the stifling, oil reek of the engine hold on the USS San Pablo, lovingly coaxing another knot from a straining steam plant threatening to blow at its seams. (The boat was actually diesel-powered and purpose built for the movie.) So, to me, a manual does make a car cooler, or at least the coolest version of that car. I also like roll-up windows and vent windows.
Great way to describe the human-machine connection and its desirability. I often sum it up as immediacy.
And well played on that rare, underappreciated McQueen reference!
I owned a 1979 Dodge Omni ( Yes, I am VERY old) with a 4 speed stick and “Boring” was in it’s DNA, stick or not! (Θ︹Θ)ს
Totally agree. I was a Ford dealer tech back in the late ’90s and it was always fun when a rare manual trans version of a car came in. Even a Taurus MT-5.
I recently sold my Mazdaspeed 3 in a pragmatic move to have a daily driver that’s more reliable and less thirsty. I ended up with a 2015 standard Mazda 3 with the base 4-banger which is not the most fun car, but I still insisted on a stick as one last vestige of fun on an otherwise practical car.
I have a 2010 Focus as my daily, and the manual is what makes the everyday driving I bought it for actually fun. I can walk to a grocery store, but I’ll often drive to one farther away just for the drive.
And when I’ve brought it to the shop for whatever, techs have come out to tell me they can’t remember the last time they saw a manual in an everyday car like that. Or increasingly these days, at all. I’m waiting for the day when I’ll be told “hang on, we’ll bring it around in a minute…we need to find someone who can drive it.”
An MT-5 is my White Whale. Did you ever see a wagon MT-5?
I specifically remember driving an MT-5 wagon once.
A friends parents had the Mazda Navajo (aka the first gen Explorer Sport) with the 5 speed and we all thought it was pretty cool.
Having a manual is important enough to me that I’ve bought the less-cool trim before just to have a clutch. When I bought my Tacoma only the 4×4 and the base model came in standard, the better looking Prerunner was automatic only. So, since I couldn’t afford and didn’t really need 4×4 I went with the base model. Well, I say base, I did spring for the extended cab and cruise control because I’m not an absolute cavemen, but still I was riding around at stock ride-height and 15″ steel wheels because I had to have a clutch.
Do I insist on a manual because I’m cool? Hell no, I came to terms with the fact that I’ll never be cool back in high school. I’m just a control freak and it drives me absolutely bananas when an automatic shifts exactly when I do not want it to.
The Bronco would only be purchased with a 7 speed manual for me yet I would still rather have a V6 turbo over the 4. On vehicles like Offroad and Sporty the lack of a manual option at the top of the line make no sense to me.
I think they are cool to you simply because they are rare, and it is surprising to think the manual trans was a standard option not all that long ago….for me the DIesel Minivan is cool simply because we cannot get on in the US, similar to Kei Cars. we are seeing them now due tot he 25 year grey market rule, but I think like old hot rods and worse 70’s “sports” cars. their is a nostalgia belief that gets seriously shattered when you actually have to live with these things.
that being said, if you manage to get a Saturn with a manual trans, outside of maybe a Redline, you will likely quickly realize the sloppy shifter and often weird clutch feel will quickly make them feel less cool. But others will still find it interesting you can make it go.
Sloppy or not, the manual in my Saturn was one of the things that made me keep it for 16 years.
Are you me? Get out of my head!
I owned a 2000 Saturn SL1 manual for 17 years and 255k miles!
I don’t know if you’re maybe talking about the later generations, but my ’95 SL1 had a great shifter & clutch. It really redeemed the whole underpowered econobox driving experience. I had a blast driving that thing up in the mountains, going over some serious switchback passes a couple times a week, engine screaming as high as I dared on the way up, and seeing how far I could make it down the other side without using the brakes (I had a weird commute for a couple of years). An automatic would’ve been absolute hell there.
ETA: I actually think that’s the exact essence of what DT is talking about. Is a cool car one that’s fun to drive? If I’d had an auto, I’d have dreaded that drive. I would have been driving an objectively uncool car. With a manual, I had fun. Cool!
I expect a trend of people responding that it doesn’t make the cars cool, it just makes them better to drive/more engaging.
Does that mean those people don’t think an engaging car is cool? It’s not cool for a car to be better to drive?
I’m fully in camp Tracy on this.
I actually think this crowd, more than any I’ve ever seen, will agree with you.
Every other car website, sure, endless net-gasms over the fastest, biggest, rarest version of whatever vehicle and you’re a total loser if you own anything but. Here, people seem to appreciate that cool isn’t just (or even mostly) what other people think, but how it makes you yourself feel.
Top gear had a lap time board AND a cool wall. They are different things. Manuals are more fun, but that doesn’t make them cooler…or at least it doesn’t add enough cool cred outside of a small niche audience. i.e. No one thought any of my manual cars were cooler because they were manual…but I bought them specifically because they were manual for my benefit. To car nerds who know, yeah, the rarity and the choice to seek out manuals makes the driver more credible and the car more interesting…but not necessarily cooler.
I would say not for pickups, I daily drive a 6MT Tacoma, and while it is rarer and more engaging than an automatic, it’s still slow and not much fun to drive.
I disagree with the premise.
The Aerostar, for example, is both a good/bad example.
The Ford slushbox of that era had such a massive disconnect in moving power from the engine to the wheels that general driveability would improve with a manual. You had a 4-second countdown to stomping on the pedal before you felt actual thrust (noise, yes, but no movement).
But the rest of the vehicle is so inappropriate for the potential for acceleration that it just doesn’t matter. It was a tin can on wheels whose balance, brakes, chassis, and general handling would never get any benefit from fixing the connection of the engine to the differential.
And that kind of thing spoke to so many vehicles of that era – and likely contributed to people accepting automatic transmissions into their lives. The critical chain to get benefit from a manual transmission was so wide, that one thing didn’t make your life behind the wheels better.
That’s a good steering wheel on the peet. (That’s what me and the boys call PT Cruisers. We’re always talking peets. Okay, no we don’t and aren’t. I just made that up. If we were always talking peets then this wouldn’t be the first time I noticed that the steering wheel is good)
I think it makes most cars better cars to drive. I think in all but rare cases it doesn’t make them cooler. My 96 RAV4 wasn’t cooler because it had a stick, but it was a lot more fun.
Agreed, except for “automated manuals”.
Absolutely – a manual can completely change a car’s character, and nearly always for the better (though maybe not pickups, vis a vis V10omous’ conversation last week).
I’ve driven everyday (i.e. not STs and up) Ford Foci with autos and own a manual version of same…the driving experience is night and day different, and it’s entirely the stick as everything else is identical.
Yeah I’ve driven very few cars that aren’t or wouldn’t be better as manuals, and very few trucks that aren’t or wouldn’t be better as autos.
I dunno, I’ve had a lot of fun in midsize trucks with manuals (Dakota, Tacoma). Plus on older ones without traction control it can be nice to have a stick for safety reasons in slick conditions. Some trucks’ rear ends like to kick out during the 1-2 shift in snow/wet.
Cool? No. More involving and engaging? Yes.
I’m actually a huge fan of Citroen 2CVs. They are not fast. They don’t handle particularly well. They are an absolute death trap in a collision with any other vehicle.
However you have to put every iota of your attention into maintaining your speed on a backroad. If you scrub any speed in any corner, it will legitimately affect you (and anyone behind you) for the next several miles. You always have to be, “on” because every little input and decision you make will meaningfully affect the next 3-5 minutes. In that respect it can be really enjoyable, as you are constantly pushing against your limits.
Are 2CVs cool? No. Are they engaging? Very much so. Are they something I want to drive all the time? Absolutely not. Though sometimes, it’s exactly what you want.
Motorcycles can be the same way – riding around town on your average 4cyl supersport, you’ll never get out of second gear. But on a smaller displacement bike, you’ll be shifting up and down constantly like a racer on the track. It really brings the immediacy of the experience to the forefront.
This.
I had a mid-90s base-model VW Golf – a naturally-aspirated 1.4l that had well over 100k miles on it. One tired unit.
But with the 5-speed, my backroads commute became an intricately-planned ballet of optimal gearshifts, millimetrically-perfect apexes and literally minutes at a time of flat-to-the-floor “acceleration”. So engaging, so direct, so enjoyable.
The opposite of boring isn’t cool, it’s fun. A manual makes them coolER, sure, but Boris Vallejo himself couldn’t make any of the above “legitimately cool.”