am I the only one who likes automatic?
Here's my reasons, yes sticks are cool they help you control the power more. But overall on the different obstacles I've done and trails all the way from easy to hard, I can say that there have been many many times when I'm glad I had an automatic vs. when I wished I had a stick. Granted, I'm not the best stick shift driver in the world. perhaps if I were, my feelings would be different. There's just been so many times where I want to concentrate on just the obstacle, and don't want to have to worry about the foot slipping off the clutch and killing myself or something.
Many times while I've been out there I've seen where people have to shift halfway through an obstacle and it ends up screwing them up (or they stall it halfway through then have to worry about restarting when there halfway up the obstacle, ahem, brett and Ryan, LOL). Often if they aren't gracious in there restarts they'll end up tipping the vehicle into a rock or worse (ahem Ryan, LOL). Another situation I can think of is on black bear pass where we were having to do very tight turns around switchbacks with basically nothing there to stop us if we went over. It was nice knowing all I had to do was put it in reverse, let off the brake, and it would back up nice and slowly. With how nervous I got a few times I think with a clutch I couldn't have been as gracious about the manuevering.
The main reason though, was that I have a 30 mile commute to work each way every day from the south side of denver to north side of denver, hence I sit in a lot of traffic. i got sick of going 1st - 2nd - 3rd - slam on brakes - 1st - 2nd - 1st - 2nd - 3rd - 2nd - slam on brakes - 1st, etc.
It costs a bit more initially, and you'll pay more to have it serviced, but my vote is auto. plus I'm lazy
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Coming down hills is one spot where I can see the definite advantage of the manual... the 4-low is much lower. However, in my F-150 the low range is so low that if I stick it in first gear (yes its auto) and low range, I can descend a very steep decline without touching the brakes once.