Stick Shift
“That’s not the stick shift”
In quite a lot of the West, the 1957 manual transmission joke above may no longer make a great deal of sense. A quick Googling reveals that the term “stick shift” appears together with the expression “lost art” in 539 online documents – 540 including this one – and the view that only “old” people know how to use one is apparently quite common on the American side of the ocean.
In the US, something above three-quarters of all passenger cars sold today are equipped with an automatic transmission. The situation is precisely reversed in Europe, with manual transmissions on around three-quarters of all new car deliveries.
Except of course in Italy. The newspapers here – possibly encouraged by auto companies with something to sell – have lately been headlining on the “boom” in deliveries of passenger cars with automatic transmissions. Last year the number of vehicles so equipped leapt to 9.07% of the market. Ten years before, in 1996, the figure was barely above one percent.
Most of the growth in sales is coming out of an automotive product sector that once would have been by definition restricted to the stick. These are ultra sub-compacts like the Toyota “Aygo,” the Citroen “C1” and the Peugeot “107,” vehicles intended to get people a few blocks to the supermarket or to pick up a child at school, not something anyone would consider a “real” car. If these things were not easy and convenient to use, no-one would drive them at all
So why do Italians so actively avoid something Americans firmly embrace? In part, the heart of the question is exactly there. That’s the kind of vehicle you might expect Americans to drive, an idea the Italians don’t find very motivating. And what are you supposed to do with four wimp gears like P, N, D and R. At the very least you’d need two more, say, “FF” for “Fast Forward” and “EF” for “Even Faster.”
There have been other justifications over the years. At one time automatic transmissions were expected to give worse mileage, and gasoline prices were immensely higher here than in the States. Then, the stick was supposed to give you better control for the kind of whippy, accurate driving Italians expect they would do – except they don’t. The Amalfi Drive is in fact way down near Amalfi and, in town at least, there’s far too much traffic for zippiness and elegant curves to dominate.
To a considerable degree, it’s really a question of sheer wrong-headedness. Automatic transmissions look like they are part of a future Italians don’t like.
The country has excellent historical reasons for disliking change and for expecting the future, any future, to be less attractive than the present. It once, as the heartland of the Roman Empire, ruled the (known) world. Today it is difficult to say that Rome governs Italy. Change has so often been for the worse that there is no burning desire to see more of it. When Italy has convinced itself of the contrary – under Fascism for instance, and the Church before that – things have turned out badly.
Though it may not look like it, what with ladies on the beach with their breasts out, lots of trendy stylists and a leftist government, this country is at heart profoundly conservative. In a way, the proof is precisely in the “behind the curve” success of the Left. The country has not one but two self-avowed “Stalinist” parties in the current government. How antiquated is that? Even the smaller Central Asian republics manage to get by with just one…