manual vs auto

I remembered back in my schooling days, most of the car had been manual... I took a ride once in my father's friend's car, it was a Volvo c automatic gearbox, you can felt the jerk and drag with every shift of gear. Later the trend had changed when I graduated. Automatic gear had become the main stream. In Taiwan - the condition is worst - there are countable cars under 2000cc with manual gear box. That is why the Proton Gen 2 can still survive here in Taiwan - some young chap who wanted to 'play' with the gear and have no money to buy a Subara hard skin shark ( synonym of Impreza) would make it the first choice.

I still remembered the feel of looking my dad driving a manual car - his last manual car was a Daihatsu Charade(993cc).

 small and fuel saving care - RM 13000+ during the old days...

 

I remembered the process of downshifting to 3rd gear while overtaking and shifted back to 4th gear later. Frankly said, I am not familiar with the manual car and tried to avoid driving any of them in the earlier days. After the I got my Z's - I had changed my view, I was thinking of getting a car with manual gearbox in the future. The Z's easytronic is great to drive as it had no clutch( still got the feeling of 'gear playing' and no need to worry about the clutch). The clutch is one of the nightmere - especially during 1st gear, if the clutch is releaesed too fast , you get this horrible jerk...

I finally saw some fanatic over the net lately. He is a high school physic teacher C who wanted to buy a Zafira 1.9 CDTI MT. We had only 2 version selling currently in Taiwan - the Z 1.8 easytronic and 1.9CDTI 6AT. He is currently driving an Hard Skin Shark STI (manual)... and he wanted a shift.

the Impreza STI rival was mitsubishi EVO series however the price of STI was way cheaper than the EVO and it had become one of street racing favorite.

 

 We had a sole Zafira B OPC(2.0 turbo , 6MT) currently roving in the northern part of Taiwan.

The blue color is unique to the OPCs series... and all the OPC car has a manual gearbox

This OPC was introduced as both a verification car and demo car but later sold to this lucky owner at an unknown price. As for the C,  I had never seen anyone wanted a manual car so badly, he is willing to pay the price but unfortunately the GM dearler turned him down........After this incident, I had begun to think about my future car ( day dreaming of coz... My Z is only 1 +yrs old...) it should not be an auto. Inspite of waiting a kickdown by stepping hard on the oil pedal, a 2 stroke of downshifting from 5th gear would make my Z roar like a lion and sprint..... hell of an experience, I remembered the sales who acompanied us for a testdrive. He had encouraged me to drive with M mode but I was too afraid to try it out at the time. Now 90% of my driving is Manual mode ( the 10 % - talking over the phone, eating ....). However buying an european car with RM200000 is considered too luxurios for me....

I saw this Exora lately - nice car, but it seems really underpower. It is selling at almost the price of WISH (minus the surchage Proton Protecting Tax of coz, WISH 2.0 is selling about 70K RM here) and yet WISH is 2.0 and Exora is 1.6. And this Campro CPS although highly praise by some is just some old technology... Well, Proton need to work harder , frankly speaking, I think the 1.6 MT version of Exora could still be a good car ....    But back to safety issue - how safe is Exora ???? NCAP 4 stars ? I think we should wait and find out when it is really tested and verified by the Euro NCAP. The Exora could not hit the Europe market as his competitor would be the Zafira 1.6...