Antique & Classic Cars Blog

I’m an unabashed manual transmission fan and agitator. But there is one drawbrack to being a clutch-and-shift-only driver: Rental cars.

You can rent a stick in Europe, but I’ve never seen one here. It’s autoboxes only–probably because an increasing portion of the population can’t even drive stick, and rental agencies don’t want cars on their lot they can’t rent.

But old habits die hard and clutching is one of them. When my wife and I were on holiday for a long weekend, we rented a car. After visiting a friend, we came to an intersection I’ve been through hundreds of times and my left foot went for the clutch on its own–to do what it always does with that pedal: push it to the floor.

Good thing we had seatbelts on. It’s one thing to explain that you lost of a few teeth in a bar fight (over something important, like why Randall Cunningham at his best was a better quarterback than Brett Favre); quite another to tell them you stomped on the brake pedal of a rented Lumina and knocked them out on the steering wheel.

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 9th, 2007 at 3:04 pm and is filed under Car parts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.