Since the devil gave us the internet several years back, the one thing it could be counted on to provide was bad news. Bad news in the morning on the desktop, bad news over lunch on the phone. Bad news while you’re waiting before dinner, and bad news when you check before bed. Today is no different; what is unexpected is the source. No, not the White House or the Hill, nor the Vatican or even Nats Park. The bad news came from Volkswagen.
The word is out that after the 2024 model year, VW will no longer offer a manual, six-speed transmission on the Golf GTI. I will pause now for the stunned silence.
One by one, vehicle manufacturers have stopped offering shifters in their cars, at least the ones they sell in the United States. Unlike Europeans, who prefer to exercise some control over their cars’ transmissions, Americans are more diffident and the minority of those who chose to shift their own has long hovered around ten percent. The requirement that every vehicle configuration, including transmission, complete the full battery of testing for such things as emissions and crash safety, makes such variety exorbitantly expensive to bring to the U.S. market. Model by model, then make by make, the possibility evaporated.
I thought I could count on Volkswagen. I should have known when Audi caved almost a decade ago. Performance cars? Nah: luxury is what sells here. Ease. Comfort. The latest thing is cars that pay attention for you, so you don’t have to – if you ever did.
My first acquaintance with a clutch was not a happy one. After I washed his Fiat roadster, my dad let me try to drive it. After bouncing the length of the driveway in frightful spasms, we both decided to postpone the first drive. But I was only fourteen.
I was still fourteen when I finally showed the clutch who is boss, but it was on the little Yamaha street motorcycle I got for my paper route. Kids, ask your mom and dad what a “paper route” is. For that matter, ask them what a “newspaper” is. There were some spasms in the first days, but being stuck for half an hour at the bottom of the steep driveway of a home that doesn’t belong to you or anybody you even know will learn you right up on how to apply power while easing out the clutch.
From the Yamaha to the Dodge Colt (by Mitsubishi) with its 52 horsepower and four forward speeds was a natural progression. In that little beige weeniemobile I learned what an advantage a manual was in snow and even ice, in the blizzard of January 1982. Look it up if you don’t recall; it was a monster around here, and yes, it hit Alabama too.
My job those last summers of high school put my skill to work as the pickup truck we used there had a three-on-the-tree (I think a lot of you will need to look that up). I could drive the dump truck, the stake-bed we used as a garbage truck, and the 1962 Mack open-cab firetruck, all because I could work a clutch.
There followed a second-generation Honda Accord with a five-speed but no a/c, if you can believe, then my first GTI, a 1987 model that taught me, for diverse reasons, not ever again to own a two door, nor a red car. I sold it when I went to Rome for seminary, but once over there I was always the driver if while traveling with other seminarians we rented a car, a rare indulgence, because, you know, Europe drives stick.
My friend George lent me his car for the two whole weeks I was in DC from Rome for priestly ordination after ascertaining that I could shift for myself. After ordination, my dad gave me his car (his final shift-your-own, as it turned out), and after that, I have enjoyed three VW-group manuals to get me up to this day. Even as I watched other manual cars fall out of production, like the proverbial little Indians, I thought that for me and VW, it would never end.
The manual transmission is a marvelous security feature, since so few people can drive it anymore, including would-be thieves. The surge in carjackings in our area is frightening, but my car is not the one they want.
I rented a nice, zippy little performance sedan last March while I was in Florida for spring training. I liked everything about it except for the dumb transmission. I was never sure what gear it was actually in, or how to put it in the gear that was wanted, so I tended to go faster than I intended because I had to use the accelerator to shift gears. Imprecise plus uncertain equals bad.
The other day while driving in classic Washington traffic, I changed lanes, but because I was in the wrong gear, fourth I think, I did not accelerate smartly enough and burdened the chap behind me. I felt badly about that. But because I shift, that almost never happens. I know what gear I am in, what gear I need to be in, and with a flick of wrist and foot, I find that gear.
That is all desperately out of fashion these days. My niece – my own flesh and blood! – insisted on a car with an automatic this summer despite the protestations and maybe even weeping of her mother, my similarly-inclined sister. We have passed from the machine age into the electronic age, and it has come for our cars. Already many have no transmission at all.
Machines burden us with the obligation of control; the operator must observe, adjust, engage. Electronics, on the other hand, offer the illusion of control. More often than not, it is the so-called “operator” who is being controlled. Even more than bad news, that is the principal product of the internet, which was the devil’s goal all along.
Monsignor Smith
