A question for the Brits...

@bravo55 Same in OZ..,😷

@whowasthatmaskedman I've heard stories of an American tourists going from London to Cornwall in second gear! 😆

@bravo55I purchased my kids first cars for them, Decent used cars, which I drove first for a while to check through and made sure they were both manual gear boxes, so they couldnt take that shortcut to a licence.😷

@bravo55 Oh yes - it's an old story that came from a car-hire company, but how accurate it is, is another matter!

My experiences were the other way.

I have only once owned a car with automatic transmission but it was very thirsty for its size, and I sold on after perhaps a year. Much more recently I was the driver on a work trip that involved two of us flying to Scotland and hiring a car for the forty or fifty miles further to our destination. Despite my ticking "Manual" on the car-hire request form prior to the trip, I ended up being given an automatic, so having to learn a different driving style in an unfamiliar car, on a very dark night in very poor weather on busy, unfamiliar roads. We managed to avoid accidents, just, and by the time we reached our destination I was becoming used to it, but I was not happy!

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My sister has inherited our parents' elderly motor-caravan, with carburettor-fitted petrol engine and manual transmission. Dad's illness had led to it being unused for many years, and she spent a small fortune on returning it to roadworthy condition. One weekend she lent it to friends for a day, and gave them instructions on how to use the choke.

They returned it complaining of it very poor performance, and making a lot of smoke. Sorting it out needed more garage work...

Yes - they'd failed to re-open the choke as they should have done very soon after starting it cold!

@ArishMell

In my youth, (25 years old) I owned a Rover 3500S with a manual gearbox, indeed that's what the 'S' meant. I was then given the task of driving the automatic version from the UK to Finland.

The automatic version had a very large brake pedal that extended over and close to where the clutch pedal was located on my car, so, on several occasions on that journey whilst pulling away from a stop and where I would normally change from first to second my left foot came down so hard on that brake pedal anyone without a seat belt would have gone through the windscreen!

I did get use to the automatic after a while but driving on the other side of the road gave me a couple of frights too.

@bravo55 Same here in Enzed.