3 pedals or it is not a sports car

Some like it some won’t.
Smile!
Humour is a good thing.

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DSG!
DSG!
WE NEED TO SEE
DSG! :blankspace:

I should flag your reply as inappropriate ! Hahaha

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Two clutches? Doesn’t seem like enough… maybe 7?

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I stand by 3 pedals.

if you need software to be faster than the next guy then you are not the talent.

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I am if I’m the engineer… :smiley:

I have a race sports car 'cuz it has paddle shifters.
“You’re still in the my way”

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Unfortunately you are partly true with today’s not really racing race cars turning more into computerised slot cars governed by too many rules.q1

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I am old enough to remember a pedal on the extreme left for the emergency brake…

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I’m fond of the 3-pedal arrangement - all but 2 of the 8 vehicles I’ve owned (one of the two wasn’t a daily driver) have featured them. But it’s clearly on the way out and I do not expect the next vehicle to so equipped.

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You said that last time, too, though… :face_with_raised_eyebrow:
(all joking side, I presume any car in my price range, let alone interest set, will not be available with a clutch pedal, if any are at all, for any price)

'member this style?

My 2003 Ranger features just such a thing.

2017 was the last vehicle purchase. I expect to get at least another 5 years out of it given ~15k annual commuting miles magically disappeared in early 2020. By then I expect the set of appealing models on the market to feature a fixed reduction gear transmission.

For now, the clutch pedal persists in some performance segments and in a number of base level economy models. The former may well recede as the capabilities of today’s supercars make their way into more mainstream vehicles and bring with them automatic transmissions that shift unnervingly quickly and decisively relative to the slushboxes of old; let’s just hope they can make them reliable. The latter are surely cheaper to manufacture, but the steady erosion of a middle market that drives manuals along with the inventory costs of SKU proliferation may conspire to end the category.

And, as I alluded to earlier, new automobile development is pivoting towards electric drivetrains which largely skip multiple-gear transmissions altogether.

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I actually think there’s a little bit of a resurgence, at least for more enthusiast type cars. Toyota added one to the Supra, GR Corolla is manual only, Mini brought them back, Hyundai has them in the Elantra and Veloster N, the new Bronco has one, the BMW M Cars, Porsches, etc. Heck my brother just bought a brand new Tacoma with a manual.

Although with the move to EVs that’s a different story. The real unicorns are the manual sedans and full size trucks. You could get a manual Ram with the Cummins for a long time, and I still kinda regret not buying a 4-door Accord sport with the 6 speed.

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what about the high beam button on the floor?

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Yup. Along w/ 3 on a tree, 4 on the floor.

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Interestingly the performance segment is one of those where we’ve seen a resurgence precisely because sticks are more fun, and in keeping with the "I don’t drive a racecar on the street because I need racecar performance; I do it because it’s fun and to look cool and multi-clutch/flappy paddles may be quicker, but they’re boring and I look less impressive to the audience"was precisely what brought it back in e.g. Porsche “911”.
Honestly i think the lower end are similar, e.g. Tacos.

The one daily I had with an automatic was a 1989 Integra. And while it was firmly within the 4-speed slushbox era I will say it was easily the least indecisive example of its kind I’ve ever driven; the novelty S setting made it very nearly decisive on the downshift for power as well as encouraging staying in a lower gear during acceleration.

My other slushbox-equipped ride was the 1996 F150, whose main ‘performance’ trick was drifting corners to mildly dramatic effect (and breaking suspension components the handful of times I went offroad). I believe that the only 5-speed versions of that generation were the rare straight-six equipped models.

Industry analyst I’m clearly not. I do however wonder if the overall trend will bottom out and stabilize within a few enthusiast segments or continue over the long term as manuals disappear from the average automobile and the number of drivers that have experienced them shrinks.

The WRX can be fun to drive, but I don’t have the inclination to track day it nor autocross it - a lot of wear and other expenses (ala race tires / wheels) - that I’m too much of a tight-fisted b__tard to part with. I’ll drop the hammer down getting onto the highway, pass with authority, and there are some corners I’ve learned to move through quickly but that’s … about it. Ergo my stay in enthusiast-ville is apt to end with said vehicle.

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I agree. These are the death throes. A violent gasping clutch at the horizon of an industry whose days, while perhaps infinite in length by our perception, are nevertheless waning. Gen Y doesn’t care about any tradition except bucking tradition (though they DO appear dedicated to ironic hipsterism, a contributor to the phenomenon under the microscope) and Gens Z and Alpha appear firmly ensconced in “as long as I have the latest “phone” and the cool kid’s games on it, nothing else matters” that surely spell the end of all automotive endeavor (outside of manufacturing electric self-drive pods summoned when it simply cannot be avoided to venture outside your domicile unit by whatever Uber-esque entity survives the ‘delivery of self and sustenance’ wars). Sure, there will remain some boutique vestiges, but my 2017 model vehicle, which I, too, imagine serving me another 5 years (even though it was already destined for replacement under original intent) will probably be my last “daily driver” that has the remotest whiff of “I am not dead yet, goddammit, and I refuse to drive a car that makes me feel like I am every. frikkin’. day!”. I still hope to cling to “project cars” and/or other cast members in my personal transportation campaign. As such, I take a page from Jay Leno, who states (paraphrasing) “electric cars are our future, partially so we enthusiasts can keep the internal combustion engine hobby, and the history it represents, alive and entertaining well into the future”. Bring on the Hondapod. Bloody biometric reader! Always claiming my face doesn’t match. How would it know if I put on the right face for this shirt?

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PS as slushboxes go, Honda does a nice job. Any of the electronic-control from ~1994-2010ish are pretty decent, honestly. Then they decided more gears were better, and return to ‘never the right gear’-dom happened again. My '17 pickup with its 7 forward gears is as crap to drive as any of the pre-electronic controls autos b/c it simply cannot decide what gear it needs to be in. Ditto for the fam’s 201* RAV4. As long as you’re steady state or smooth accelerating, all is well, and fuel economy surprisingly good. But the second you do anything ‘unpredictable’, they whig out. One of my favorite moves in driving is to accelerate. Pedal down and go. However fast the current gear allows that is fine. Works a treat in manuals. I can mash that sucker anywhere in its range & simple, smooth, RPM increase is what happens. Lovely. In any slushbox, though? Nope. 7 steps of de-lock torque convertor and downshifting later and my interest in accelerating has left the building. I’m making buckets of cacophonous “look at me”-ness, but no go. :fu: automatics! And more gears has made it even worse. That’s part of why those 4-spd autos from the 90s were the pinnacle; fewer choices to muddle betwixt.

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