Comment by bane | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bane | Hacker News Reader

Just got back from another trip to Europe where I encountered the slightly odd European preference for manuals. I can kind of see why, the car culture is quite different from the States -- where most cars are two or three generations beyond the kind of automatics most Europeans associate with the transmission type. The inverse is that most European diesels are two or three generations beyond what most Americans associate with the type.

The cars in Europe seem to be sharply divided between small, efficient feeling manual hatchbacks and powerful autobahn chewing rear wheel drive German luxury/sport sedans that will pass you on the inside lane like you're standing still when you're already going 140kph.

I think because Europeans simply don't see most advanced American, Japanese and Korean cars they simply have no idea what we're getting on about and they have virtually no experience with the state of the art in modern transmissions. Having just spent a few weeks driving around in a manual again, it felt pretty absurd and old timey to be honest.

For example, the absurdly tiny golfcart/hatchback I was touring around in claimed around 17km/l fuel efficiency, I don't think I ever quite hit that, I was more in the 15-16 km/l range. It was so small, I couldn't fit both my luggage and my friends in it, and it struggled to maintain speed on hills with the aircon on.

Coming back home, my very modern, full sized Japanese sedan hits around 19km/l on most daily drives. Plus I can actually put both people and luggage in it at the same time, and it hits highway speeds with absolutely no drama. Most new full-sized cars in the U.S. are getting somewhere around that fuel efficiency, and the cars are closer in size to the autobahn chewers than the econohatches.

I couldn't really find any particular advantage to driving a manual, and I drove it for about 3,000km just on this trip. But there were tons of disadvantages. When I asked my friends why the preference, all I got back where vague statements about "being more in touch with the car" and a bunch of outdated old-wives tales about fuel efficiency.

It isn't an "odd European preference". In this case, it is the USA that is the outlier, with most of the rest of the world preferring manuals.

Fuel efficiency is not a wife's tale but rather a statistical fact, except perhaps for very new, very expensive high end luxury cars where an automatic can have a slight edge under somewhat dodgy laboratory conditions.

And "being more in control" is also a fact. You cannot be more in control of a mechanical device when your control of that device is mediated by a complicated technology that behaves in ways you can't easily predict. If you want to precisely control torque and engine behaviour yourself, which can be useful in many situations from the mundane to icy or snowy conditions, a manual is superior.

It simply is a non-debate in most of the world. Americans seem to get quite defensive about it for some reason, perhaps because they associate manuals with being "macho" or an elitist gearhead or something. There's nothing weird abotu driving a manual.

No, there's nothing weird about it, but the stories about why they are better are pretty much entirely down to "well I like it better." Okay, that's fine.

But statistically, CAFE standards aren't being met by manuals, but by automatics and other advanced drivetrains. People can yell "but physics!" all they want, but the aggregate data is showing clearly that manual drivetrains are not the path towards increased efficiency. So clearly physics are favoring non-manuals.

As I said, high end automatics can outperform manuals in lab conditions. This is because obviously they can choose to perfectly and optimally shit up and down gears in a lab better than a human can.

That does not mean that they can do so in real life. A human knows what conditions they are driving in. A human knows if they need to stop in 50ft, a human has all kinds of intelligence about upcoming torque requirements that a gear box simply doesn't. So I am highly doubtful that "physics are favouring non-manuals" because an automatic is not a magical device that can somehow know these things.

I'm surprised that people are suddenly treating emission labs as sources of factual accuracy considering recent events.

So that's efficiency. You can dismiss the superiority of manual for driving on gravel, snow, ice or anywhere as "I like it better" but frankly it is consensus that driving on a manual gives more control.

Consider that if an automatic gave better control, then in situations where control is very important, such as, I don't know, rally driving, people would use automatics. But they don't. Because it doesn't. This isn't "I like it better" - if automatics were better there would be a huge competitive advantage to using them and manual drivers would be outcompeted and swiftly become history.

Having more control isn't something everyone values: some people would rather focus on where they are going than the process of getting there. By that metric automatics are far better.

Absolutely. I'm not saying manuals are better. Like any technology choice there's a trade-off. In this case the trade-off is it makes driving a car less complex, which is good, at the cost of some other things.

I just find it curious the notion from some Americans that driving a manual is inherently old fashioned and thus inferior in every way. Maybe it is a technology bubble thing as well.

The "German luxury/sport sedans" overtaking you will almost certainly be automatic.

Having lived in the US, Canada and Europe, I have spent a lot of time driving both manual and automatic transmissions. I would say that the answer "being more in touch with the car" is not far fetched. I enjoy driving, different cars give me a different experience. But I find driving automatic cars very boring, and that's about the only reason (might be a bad reason, but still valid). I can drive both just as well, I never really thought about the fuel efficiency (I have a motorbike for driving around city that will take care of that) nor have I ever heard anyone mentioning that - I have heard that they were more expensive, but I've never tried to buy one in Europe.

Regarding the size of the cars. US cities have been well planned and designed for cars, while a lot of European cities haven't really been planned for cars back then. So, when you live in a city like London, most people will go for a smaller sized car rather than an SUV (or other types of big cars common in the US), otherwise going through those small two-way traffic street and find parking can be annoying. Otherwise, I might not mind as much having a big comfortable automatic car.

If you are being passed on the inside lane you* are in the wrong lane no matter what speed you are travelling.

Are you seriously saying a modern full sized automatic sedan is more efficient than a modern compact car? Or are you actually comparing a modern sedan to an old compact?

Those turbocharged <1L little hatchbacks would absolutely trounce your big car for efficiency. And for a lot of people, whose primary use of a car is taking themselves to work, it makes an awful lot of sense.

Yes, and I actually provided the economy figures in my comment. It's crazy, but modern drivetrains in big cars can make the big cars more efficient than small hatchbacks.

"Those turbocharged <1L little hatchbacks would absolutely trounce your big car for efficiency."

Only if you drive them like in the lab tests. If you drive them normally, expect a very big discrepancy between the lab tests and real driving mileage. Much bigger than for normal cars with big engines.

The whole reasoning behind downsizing goes like this:

1. small engines are lighter than big engines, so they offer better mileage in city driving because there is less mass to accelerate

2. small engines have lower internal friction than big engines, and they need less fuel when idling, or near-idling, which you often do in city conditions

3. most of the time, most drivers don't need much power, particularly for city driving or when cruising at a constant speed

This leads to a conclusion that to maximize fuel efficiency, you need a small, low-powered engine for daily use with a strong turbocharger to help get more power in very rare events when you need it (like passing over).

However, there are a few caveats with this line of reasoning, and I guess some (Japanese) car manufacturers already noticed it and refuse to put downsized engines into their cars:

1. A turbocharged engine is much less efficient at full throttle than an NA engine of the same power (couple of reasons for this: lower compression-ratio, higher lambda to cool down a very small engine so it doesn't melt, losses of energy in the compressor / turbocharger).

2. If you downsize too much, normal driving will require to run the engine near the top of its power and make use of turbocharging very often.

3. The longevity of the engine is negatively affected and there are more components that can break. And modern designs that tend to reduce turbo-lag are complex and expensive to repair (dual compressor/turbocharger designs, variable geometry turbochargers).

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