Belts, Transmissions and Bibliographies

After the "catastrophic" failure of its serpentine belt made my car unusable, I found myself in a fix because I can't drive a stick shift.

This made me curious. Am I at a disadvantage as a driver because I can't do this? Just how many cars on the road in the US have a manual transmission anyway?

The most current information I was able to dig up dates back 10 years. Wards Auto World produced graphs showing that in 2000, about 10% of light vehicles on the road in the US had manual transmissions. That was down from a little over 15% five years earlier.

Mark Rechtin wrote an article in Automotive News around the same time possibly explaining this pattern. He attributed increasing adoption of automatic transmissions to reasons such as people needed to drive in traffic, using their vehicles as mobile offices, and talk on the phone in the car. He also notes manual transmissions didn't provide as much of a fuel economy or cost premium as they used to. Also, having a stick shift reduces a vehicle's resale value. The (increasingly smaller) savings of buying a manual transmission is canceled out by the lower price it fetches in the used car market.

Being confronted by this mini-crisis made me think about how I deal with situations I don't understand. I decided to find out, using information instead of guesswork, whether or not being unable to drive a stick shift put me at a disadvantage. It seems that since fewer than one in 10 cars on the road has a manual transmission, it doesn't.

Of course, if that one out of 10 is in your household, and you're stuck because you can't drive it...

Interestingly, Cox et. al found in a study that teenage boys with ADHD who drove a manual transmission-equipped vehicle where more attentive to their driving than ones who used an automatic.

So there's that I guess.


In case you want to do some more reading, I found these references helpful:

Checking the auto world's pulse. (2001). Ward's Auto World, 37(11), 16. Retrieved from Full Text PDF PDF: http://vnweb.hwwilsonweb.com/hww/jumpstart.jhtml?recid=0bc05f7a67b1790e4741fae46b91d0b7ac1fff1a8705886e0b8459d630c3849026e23a87614ffdc4&fmt=P


Cox, D., Punja, M., Powers, K., Merkel, R., Burket, R., Moore, M., Thorndike, F., & Kovatchev, B. (2006). Manual transmission enhances attention and driving performance of ADHD adolescent males. Journal of Attention Disorders, 10(2), 212-216.

Rechtin, M. (2000). Sticks hit the skids: Automatic transmissions are replacing manuals as the people's choice. Automotive News, (5856), 34+. Retrieved from HTML: http://vnweb.hwwilsonweb.com/hww/jumpstart.jhtml?recid=0bc05f7a67b1790e4741fae46b91d0b7cc67023b1846996cc43391d27d7f82dfab409b871fd0d36e&fmt=H

Weiss, M. J. (2001). Departments - THE GRID - SHIFTING GEARS: Where to find owners of manual transmission cars. American Demographics., 23(3), 72.