“You let your girl drive?”

The expiring joy and liberation of driving stick

When I was a small child, my father drove a 1984 white Mustang GT he affectionately called Horseballs (Why? Who knows) and my mother drove an Izuzu Trooper – both manual transmission vehicles. 

By the time I was old enough to generally understand how an automobile worked, they’d traded in their sticks for automatics, preferring, like so many, their ease of operation.

I went to an all-girls boarding school at 13, where cars weren’t allowed, so I didn’t have the usual urge to learn to drive as soon as I was able. My junior year, I took a driver’s ed course that included hands-on driving instruction, sparing my parents the stress of teaching me themselves, though my father often recalls one life-threatening merge from which he saved us both during those early months. I failed my written test once before I passed it, and failed my driving test once, too, for failure to stop fully at what I am sure was a strategically obscured stop sign. I can still conjure the visceral memory of that failed stop, looking sideways at my examiner as she quickly marked her clipboard with a small frown. I can also vividly recall the successful parallel park that finally earned me my license. 

Even before I learned to drive, I understood the freedom it offered. I also understood that not all cars are created equal. Just because you can operate an automatic doesn’t mean you can drive any car. I must have been 16 when one of my uncles first let me get behind the wheel of his manual Ford Ranger and drive it around my grandparents’ field. There was so much to keep track of, the left foot pulling out while the right foot pushed in, balancing the clutch against the gas just right so as not to stall. In the great expanse of a wide open field, it didn’t much matter if I drove in a straight line, but I couldn’t imagine managing the clutch while steering on a busy road. 

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As I got older, I discovered that driving was gendered. While there were certainly exceptions, in my high school summer jobs, I noticed most boys my age drove stick shift cars while girls, when asked if they could drive stick, demurred, saying they’d never had the chance to learn. As the only child of a single mother and an acolyte of women’s education, I was horrified by the idea that there might exist a class of skill that I simply would not possess. By college, I had traveled enough to know that outside of America, most cars in most countries are manuals. Would I be one of those people (those Americans? those women?) who simply couldn’t? But no one in my immediate family owned a manual car and, as a college student in New York City, my driving skills were irrelevant. Driving stick would have to wait. 

When I moved to DC in 2009, a year after graduation, my mother gifted me a 2001 Toyota Avalon. It was pearl white with a beige leather interior, a perfect vehicle for a sixty-year-old woman, but… not for me. I knew that the only way I’d actually learn to drive stick was if I drove a manual of my own so in September, I traded it in for a 2010 gunmetal gray Toyota Corolla Sport. I stalled out several times during the test drive, but drove well enough no one called the cops or refused to sell me the car. 

A few weeks later, my boyfriend and I drove north to a family gathering in northern NJ. We somehow managed to hit a major traffic jam in every single metro area between Washington DC and Trenton. I must have spent four hours of that six hour drive, just shifting in and out of first gear, stalling out at least half the time. 

“Curse this manual transmission!” I thought, wishing for the easy stop and start of an automatic.

But the drive home was easier. I hit fewer slowdowns, and was already gaining confidence with the clutch. I drove both ways because my boyfriend–also a boarding school and NYC-college graduate–hadn’t learned how to drive stick. So, until he learned (and he did), I did the driving. 

By the following spring, I was a confident manual driver, feeling joyful that I’d captured a skill that could have remained out of reach. 

One sunny weekend afternoon, we drove out to the Virginia countryside for a day hike, and stopped afterwards for a cold drink and a snack at a gas station near the trailhead. We were sitting in the car, windows down, sunroof open, enjoying our refreshments and a cool breeze when a gas station attendant taking a break nearby leaned over to ask my boyfriend a question. 

“You let your girl drive?” he said. 

I laughed as my boyfriend and I exchanged a look. If only he knew, I thought! 

“Yeah,” my boyfriend said, a little flustered. “It’s her car!” 

The gas station attendant raised his eyebrows, and shaking his head, walked back into the store. I smirked to myself, quietly self-satisfied. 

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A few years later, I moved into downtown Washington DC and sold the Corolla. It wasn’t until 2020, after many life changes, that I found myself living in semi-rural Connecticut, in need of a car. The used car market was red-hot due to delays in new car production as a result of the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic. I decided a pickup would serve the necessary benefit of a second household vehicle, while also having the added advantage of allowing our family to carry furniture, building materials, and other home improvement supplies that wouldn’t easily fit in the back of an SUV, without needing to rent a vehicle. I found a 2011 Toyota Tacomo, a 4-cylinder manual with an extended cab: perfect. 

While not a requirement of my car search, I enjoyed that the truck, who I affectionately nicknamed Tulip, would let me once again drive stick, something I hadn’t done consistently since I sold the Corolla nine years before. Now as a more experienced driver, I appreciated how the manual transmission brought me closer to the vehicle as a tool of mobility. I could choose the correct gear for the safest speed in bad weather. Once, when my toddler had killed the battery by leaving the hazards on, I successfully push-started the truck out of my sloping driveway, rolling the car downhill with the car door open, then jumping in as she gathered speed, getting the magical clutch and accelerator pop to start the engine, a life-saver that would have been hours of waiting for a jump in an automatic. 

Over the decades, humans have shed technologies that now seem quaint in their obsolescence – the rotary phone, the cassette tape, the fax machine, the discman. But few, if any of such inventions were a true thrill to operate. None I can think of left its handler exhilarated by the feeling of hurtling through time and space, controlling a two-ton rolling object moving a mile a minute with all four of your limbs moving independently. 

Yet, the combustion-powered automobile has likely reached its extinction event. Electric vehicles are only growing more mainstream, and self-driving cars are emerging as a viable alternative to human-operated vehicles. Regulation and driving culture seem to be the only barriers to a driverless car takeover. While it may take a decade for both regulation and car culture to embrace the disruptive potential of this technology, electric driverless vehicles threaten to make car ownership in a traditional sense virtually obsolete. 

I struggle to imagine the full extent of the economic fallout that will result from the mainstreaming of driverless cars. From long-haul truckers, to Uber drivers and automotive service and repair professionals, millions of jobs will be automated away by the self-driving electric vehicle. I imagine most people (and governments) are no more prepared to grapple with these enormous economic disruptions to “employment culture” than they are to surrender control of the vehicle to begin with. But the disruptive power of technological innovation  means such changes are all but inevitable. 

There is a quiet tragedy in giving control of a vehicle that humans once wielded for pleasure, over to AI. I both relish the chance to never again face a long-distance car trip that requires me to stay awake, and mourn the expiration of the manual transmission technology that has given me such pride and joy. 

There’s little question that, the sooner we give up our high-combustion commutes, the longer we’ll be able to sustain human life on earth. But such massive disruptions in human behavior are hard to initiate and can trigger status quo bias and resistance that looks a lot like social upheaval.

Yet, the driverless electric vehicle offers a helpful invitation to answer some more general questions about the role of technology in human life:

What do we do when a new invention will eliminate billions of previously essential hours of labor? 

If price is determined by the juncture of supply and demand, what happens when demand for human labor falls to zero? 

Do we resist? Or do we embrace the chance to create a different culture of “work” for everyone? 

Why do you work?

I know Tulip won’t run forever. If I’m lucky, she’ll last long enough for me to teach my eldest stepdaughter how to drive stick, one more link in the generational chain of “women who drive.” But she’s likely to be the last. Like morse code or shorthand, the ability to drive stick will be lost to the ages, a skill and a joy that lives no more, outside of the high-end luxury sports car arena. 

I’ll be sad to lose her when she finally goes, though if it’s the price of sustaining human life on earth, it’s a cost I’m willing to bear. I’ll have to settle for stories I’ll hope to tell my future grandchildren. 

“When I was young, we didn’t just have to steer and stop the vehicle,” I’ll say imperiously. “You see, there was this thing called a clutch.”

Do you drive stick? How did you learn? What does it mean to you? How do you feel about the transition from gas-powered to self-driving electric vehicles? I can’t wait to hear your thoughts!