I Can’t Stand Automatic Sports Cars or Their Drivers

September 16, 2008 Automatic, Rant 8 Comments

I’ve never owned an automatic car in my life. I did drive my mom’s auto ’93 Accord in high school for a while, but that was as close as I ever got. I learned to drive in an ’80 Subaru station wagon, then bought a ’91 Honda Civic HB, a ’95 Acura Integra and now my beloved ’04 s2000, all with manual transmissions.

I know that the majority of the cars on the road are automatics, and most of the time I could care less what someone else is driving, but it drives me nuts when people buy expensive sporty-cars with an automatic transmission and talk about all of the “racing” they’ve done and random cars they’ve “beat.” I’ve got a friend (sorry if you’re reading Cos =p) that has a BMW 335i, which is a pretty fast car… but it’s an automatic (regular automatic, not fancy paddle shift w/clutch like the M3). Every time he starts to mention a Porsche he “smoked” or a motorcycle he beat, i usually just roll my eyes and change the subject, ’cause otherwise it’s just going to become a fight.

When you drive an automatic, you have almost nothing to do with the performance of your car. You should be faster than cars that are faster than you, and slower than cars that are slower. If you “race” an automatic car, you might as well just email each other the standard 0-60 or quarter mile times and be done with it. If you “beat” a manual car that should be faster than you, that means the other driver sucked, there was nothing special about how hard you pushed the accelerator.

With a manual car, a lot of it comes down to the driver. There’s a wide range of driving abilities out there so you can compete with a variety of cars in your class and if you beat a car that should be faster than you, you have something to be proud of. If I were to run against a manual 335i with a medium/poor driver I would likely beat him and could continue my disdain for BMW drivers (again, sorry Cos), if the same car had a good/medium driver, me and my s2000 would likely lose and their BMW superiority complex would remain intact… but at least in this scenario, they would have earned it.