The Lost Art of Shifting Gears

  On a family vacation to Mexico last month, the subject of my most recent column, I encountered an endangered species.

  A stick shift.

  If you’re a young reader, you probably have no idea what that is.

  Which proves my point. The stick shift, at least in this country, has become an endangered species.

  A stick shift, for those unfamiliar with the term, is formally known as a manual transmission, used to change gears in cars. Stick shifts have all but exclusively been replaced in the United States by automatic transmissions, which is why the term is rarely if ever heard any more.

  That isn’t the case in Mexico. We used Ubers to get to our destinations there, and every single one of them had a manual transmission.

  The automatic transmission that displaced stick shifts was invented by a Canadian steam engineer in 1921. It was primitive and never used commercially. General Motors developed an improved version, first used in 1948 Oldsmobiles.

  Oldsmobile – another term that may have younger readers scratching their heads.

  Once the oldest surviving automotive brand, Oldsmobiles were known among other things for models with zippy sounding names like the Cutlass and the Toronado, Oldsmobiles were discontinued in 2004 due to declining sales.

  They were groundbreaking, even historic, however. As mentioned above, the transmissions they introduced were so revolutionary and popular that they largely consigned the stick shift to the history books.

  Why? Because they were so much easier – virtually effortless – to use. A stick shift required the driver to step on a clutch (a pedal on the floor next to the brake pedal) and physically move a lever to change gears. This could and often did result in lugging engines and grinding gears. Fingernails on blackboards had nothing on grinding gears.

  Manual transmissions most often were one of two types, three-on-the-tree and four-on-the-floor. The former used a gearshift lever with three gears mounted on the steering column. The latter had the gearshift on the floor of the car, in about the same spot where automatic transmission shift levers are now, and added a fourth gear.

  My mother had a Nash Rambler with three-on-the-tree. (It also had a large clock prominently mounted on top of the dashboard and to my mind was one of the funniest looking cars ever made. My mother’s custom paint job, a lemon-yellow body and black roof, added to the effect.) The gears shifted sluggishly and with difficulty. One of the few times my mother ever cursed was when she was agonizingly   grinding the gears.

  My first car had a four-on-the-floor transmission. It was a used MGA, a two-seater convertible sports car, bright red with a white top. It was sporty mainly in the sense that it provided sport for the mechanics who continually worked on it. It cost me $400 and another $400 to keep it running for a year.

  It also proved to be dangerous. With two friends shoehorned in beside me, I drove it to Sun Valley and back, never suspecting potential disaster. Back in Boise at the end of the trip, we stopped at an intersection and the right front wheel fell off. If it had happened on the highway at 60 mph, you would’t be reading this. 

  It was fun to drive, though, largely due to the fun of shifting the four gears. There was something almost intoxicating about pushing the clutch pedal, shifting a gear and exuberantly accelerating to the next gear. And you got to do it three times before hitting the final gear, with the engine revving seductively each time.  

  The MG had another feature that was like the mutinous wheel in that it took a while to manifest itself. It had a small crack in the floor on the passenger’s side. I discovered this one rainy night while taking my then girlfriend home from a date.

  The hidden feature became apparent when we drove through a large puddle at an unwise rate of speed. The second we hit the puddle, a geyser of muddy water erupted through the crack in the floor. It absolutely drenched my passenger. We were having an argument at the time, and she never would believe that I hadn’t done it on purpose. 

  Used improperly, manual transmissions could mutiny. The keyboard player in a band I played in as a teenager learned this the hard way during a trip to California, where we’d gone to make a record. He unwisely used the clutch to keep our vehicle, an old panel truck, from rolling backwards down the steep hills of San Francisco. The result was a burned clutch and a cloud of foul smelling smoke.

  I first became aware of how endangered manual transmissions were becoming when trying to buy a new car with one. (This was when a new car didn’t cost as much as your first house did.) A salesman said they no longer were sold in the U.S., but that it might be possible to get one using a European delivery plan. Buy it here, pick it up in Europe, use it to see the sights and ship it home. Upon checking, however, he learned that not even on the other side of the Atlantic were stick shifts available.

  On a recent walk, I stopped to admire a strikingly beautiful Porsche. To my surprise, it had an automatic transmission. A world-class sports car with an automatic transmission! That’s what it’s come to. 

  The stick shift isn’t quite dead. You can still buy a manual-transmission Acura, Aston Martin, BMW, Cadillac Blackwing, Lotus, Porsche and a number of more modestly priced cars, though they’re usually available in only a limited number of trim options.

  Other than during our trip to Mexico, I couldn’t tell you the last time I actually saw a car with a stick shift. They’ve pretty much gone the way of the rotary dial phone.

  A lot of people don’t know what those were any more, either.

Tim Woodward’s column appears every other Sunday in The Idaho Press and is posted on woodwardblog.com the following Mondays. Contact him at woodwardcolumn@gmail.com.