A couple of comments:
1. When I went to buy my truck (3/4 ton with diesel), I couldn’t find one with a manual trans. GM doesn’t even offer one in any of their trucks…I wanted one so that when I am towing I can select the proper gear for a hill that is coming up, either up or down, and also so that I can get into the higher gears sooner. The automatic doesn’t seem to know what to do when I try to accellerate quickly, it jumps around and hunts for the gear before settling…but I guess most people buy these inefficient trucks to pose in, not for work…
2. I would like to see the licenses have a class that approves people to drive a manual transmission vehicle. My wife has never driven one and doesn’t want to, but I don’t think that she should be albe to unless she has been tested in one. Your examples of hill starts with the parking brake applied wouldn’t even occur to a person who has not been properly trained to drive a manual vehicle. I accually had a woman roll back into my truck on a hill, and I had stopped atleast ten feet back from her…her tail lights and rear facia hit the steel bumper of my truck, she jumped out of her car and blamed me for hitting her??? Luckily a bystander saw the whole thing and struck around to give a statement to the police, or I would have been on the hook to replace the whole rear end of her car…I wonder how the conversation went with her husband that night?? lol
I agree with you that the majority of vehicles sold in North America have an automatic transmission (I think I read somewhere that it was 95%), but I wonder if that is because most vehicles don’t even offer them?
Just food for thought.
As for manual cars coming after learning to ride a bike…I had a bike when I was 9, but it was a 3spd with an auto clutch. I learned to drive in a manual trans car because it was more fun to drive dad’s four cyliner with manual than mom’s V8 automatic…