You can import a car from Europe where they are still 70% manual as far as new sales go.
Only if itās 25 years old or older.
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Tester
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Manual vehicles are still very popular in South America. Not sure what the percentage is.
Not too hard to adapt to a manual. The pedals are still left for the clutch and right for the brake. The only difference is you shift with your left hand rather than the right, but the gear pattern is the same (i.e. left side for low gears, right for higher ones). After a day or two it feels familiar.
Driving right hand drive manuals make my left hand want to mirror the shift pattern. Takes some practice not to start off in 3rd gear.
I have never broken an automatic.
I have never had the opportunity to drive one but that was my thoughts also.
Both were Right hand drive Automaticās. The Toyota was out of Leeds/Bradford airport in the notrht of england when a partner rental company came to dadās rescue after he cancelled the reservation for an auto with Enterprise by mistake.They were first given a manual transmission (didnāt say what make/model) then were given the Toyota for the same days and rate. .
Other than the tight room for 5 adults with luggage the Toyota did everything we needed it to. Was much more comfortable after we dropped off the luggage. Our very rough calculation is we got 40+mpg running from one little village to the next putting 300 miles on the car while not venturing more than 40mi from where we started. If Toyota had brought it here a year earlier than they did i would have seriously considered it but had bought the Forester a year earlier.
The Nissan was the ony other auto available after we asked them if they had something smaller than the Ford Mondeo which was a nice roomy car but was a bigger car than the folks felt we needed.
Budget practically was taking bets that weād find the Nissan Micra too small but it actually felt roomier even if it wasnāt quite as happy on the way out of dublin on the motorway than it was on the narrow back roads and one village where even that small of a car you needed to fold the mirrors in. It was comporable in size to the Mazda we had for 19yrs so we were all pretty much used to it.
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Most of my driving was in hilly city traffic and the clutches lasted 50 to 75k miles. A clutch job the days can run over $1000. Some of the older manual transmissions had worn out synchronizers and required double clutching. The new automatic transmissions seem pretty complicated and some bugs show up after a while. The older designs are pretty well debugged.