I witnessed the greatest act of stupidity I've ever seen

Between (redacted) four wheelers and other morons driving I learned MANY years ago to learn to spot developing hazards. This is covered in a lot of the Smith System training. If stupid can happen expect stupid to happen. A car is sitting about to enter the road and you can't see their eyes start slowing down. This has saved me many times over the years. It stinks, but you should get off the power and cover the brake until the hazard clears. I'm old school when it comes to driving. Drivers today are doing a lot of things that take their minds off their mirror and instrument scans. I also learned over the years that I will NOT fight over the right of way. I saw a hazard I started to slow down. Remember a sudden brake in heavy traffic and you could be hit in the rear. It's always best to slow.

 

I'd agree along those lines. But if they never figured out how to make a manual tranny pretend to be an automatic, then transmission maintenance would just be another hit to the bottom line. They'd still fill the seats, auto or no auto. Say every mega truck had to have the tranny replaced once a month. That's five grand cost compared to a truck bringing in $30k to the bottom line. The math works.

Either way, I think it's funny to believe driving a manual transmission is something deserving of a medal. It's one of the easier things on this planet to learn. Clearly easier than spotting a hazard and choosing to err on the side of safety while grossing 105k.

 

A couple years ago a couple school busses missed their exit on i80 in Nj. Instead of going up to the next exit and making a flip, they used an emergency vehicle turn around. One bus pulled out in front of a Tri axle dump truck. He hit the bus broad side. It was a huge mess with multiple fatalities.

 

I bet you could too! I can do it and I’m a bat (well, sometimes I am).

 

Agree 100%

 

I remember hearing about that. What a mess. Totally could’ve been avoided.

 

Wit the idiots that are out there? I am not surprised. Wait a bit, there will be some one more foolish that will bee worse than that.

 

I taught a ton of guys in the oilfield. Really after getting them to understand why you have to rev-match, the rest was just practice. Some people could understand it faster than others, but in the end, it never took more than half a day to get the light bulb to turn on. After that, just have them drive back and forth on the frontage road for a few days until they were comfortable passing a 3rd party road test. Easy peasy.