A Standard for Driving Fun
MY FRIEND’S SON looked over in puzzlement as we drove through town during rush hour on our way north to ski country.
“Why do you shift so much? My Dad doesn’t do that.”
“Well, that’s because this is a standard. He drives an automatic, which shifts for you.” Because your Dad apparently doesn’t really know how to drive, I diplomatically refrained from appending.
That, after all, was a fundamental dichotomy of my youth: those who drove standards and those who drove automatics. Anyone who worked on a farm driving tractors or pickups learned to drive a manual early on. But most everyone knew how. Even the functional family sedans of the day tended to be three on the tree.
And in Maine, a standard had special advantages. You could rock it out of a snow-clogged driveway. Or get to higher gear for less torque and more traction on slippery roads. And, of course, standards got better mileage, which mattered back in energy crisis of the mid-1970s, when gas rocketed to upwards of 55 cents a gallon.
But most of all, standards were fun. You were actually in control of the car. With some practice, you could shift without the clutch, which marked a certain mastery of driving.
Automatics were what your grandparents drove. I put people who couldn’t drive a standard in the category with those who couldn’t paddle stern in a canoe or didn’t know how to tie a bowline, that most useful of knots.
When a couple of college friends and I started off on a rite-of-passage cross-country journey, three of us were amazed that the fourth in our camping quartet couldn’t drive the old clunker manual van we’d brought for the trip. That failing was the cause of no small amount of ribbing; at the time, it seemed tantamount to not being able to change a tire or check the oil yourself.
No more. You can’t call it a lost art, exactly, but standard knowledge is an ability in steep decline, and has been for some time. With the exception of high-end sports cars, the vast majority of vehicles sold in this country are automatics; even most pickups have gone that route. Last year, fewer than 4 percent of the new vehicles were standards; that ticked up to 6.5 percent in the first quarter of this year.