Auto vs. Manual Transmission......

Oh yeah...... Driver's who shift play Football, on the Gridiron, with a pigskin.
Driver's who drive autoT's chase a puck around on the ice! Possibly the stupidest game ever concieved, Curling is more interesting. So there....

 

.........You actually tried and autoT and loved it by the end of the night on your first shift; in the snow !?? How dare you say that !?? Have you not read these posts??? You are a treasonous, traitor, sell-out, backstabber, plus, you can't shift gears - that's why you went to an autoT - because you can't shift!
Be honest, you are not a real truck driver. Real truck drivers shift gears. And, you are are addicted to technology. Have you not read these posts? What is wrong with you? How dare you acknowledge that an autoT has some merits. You should be ashamed of yourself. "Real drivers shift gears."

Also, if if you read the thread of posts, you will read where someone asserts that because you no longer shift gears, you are now a dangerous driver. AutoT's make drivers become dangerous. Of course, that is ludacris. I ask, "if you take a driver with unsafe driving habits, and put them in a manual shift truck, do they suddenly become safe?" Certainly not. "If you take a driver who has safe driving habits, and put him in an autoT, do they become unsafe?" Obviously not. Whether an individual is safe or not is based on whether they accept a culture of safety. But, now now that you drive an autoT, feel free to text, make phone calls, crochet, play Nintendo, eat and watch TV while driving. You are not a "real" truck driver, you don't shift gears.

So there,........

 

All kidding aside, when the PC first came out, I never thought they would last (PC = personal computer not politically correct.) Seriously, I thought PC's were a passing fad. But remember, the first PC, the Commodore 64, cost a a fair amount of money in the early 1980's, and was very limited, no internet, no web sites. Today most of you Bull-shiFters are reading this on a handheld computer. The technological advancements have been astronomical in PC's (read cell phones). AutoT's are going to do the same thing.

Auto T's are your first glimpse of future changes that are coming, just like the tractor replaced the horse and plow.

I hear the echoes of farmers standing by a field, mocking that the tractor "had too many moving parts, was too expensive, and would never replace the horse and plow."

So, you shiFt-heads, are the modern-day equivalent of that farmer, laughing at that new-fangled tractor contraption. The old cliche was," real farmers don't use tractors, they know how to plow." (Modern translation) "real truck drivers don't use AutoT's, they know how to shift. ........."

And again, I attended a state-approved driving school where we were taught to double clutch, in my first job I learned how to float gears up and down, when I started to drive an autoT, I realized I had met the future.

But, let's agree to disagree, as someone very correctly posted "to each his own."

 

I sincerely appreciate your input, finally, someone with sufficient intellect to respond with something besides "real truck drivers shift gears", or "autoT's instantly make you a dangerous driver", or fictional statistics that prove autoT's cause accidents.

And yes, you are right, I am clumping automatic and automated into one category that I refer to as "autoT's. You are correct that they are actually two different animals.

Perhaps you missed the horse vs. plow analogy, the point was not that the tractor is faster, the point is that technology replaced a former method of completing the same task, ie, plowing a field.

The nexus of my point is, regardless if it is an automated or automatic transmission, (overall) the technology is still in its infancy. Similar to the Commodore 64 some 30 years ago vs. the handheld computer that you might be reading this on. I believe that in 30 years, people will visit museums and ponder how men once "shifted gears."

Automated/automatic transmissions are the future, they will be combined with other technologies such as the internet, and telemetrics, resulting in safer, fuel efficient trucks. As I mentioned in a previous post, technology is being perfected where the truck will have a satellite link to topographical maps which will a priori adjust speed and shift gears.

I fully understand that some individuals are emotional about that because in time drivers might become as extinct as the wolly mammoth. When was the last time that you saw an elevator with an elevator operator? I am sure they felt the same way when push button panels were invented.

Again, thanks.