Three pedals and a gearstick used to be the defining part of car transmissions, and for many of us, it was at one point hard to imagine what it would be like to drive a car without pressing the clutch pedal and swapping the cogs ourselves. “The times, they are a-changing,” as Bob Dylan would say. However, with hybrid and electric cars eliminating the need for a manual transmission, and more and more people favoring the convenience of an automatic, the number of new manual cars you can buy has decreased dramatically over the last ten years. Some ultra-cheap cars, like the Nissan Versa, are still manual, though, as it is cheaper to build than an automatic. The stick shift has gone from being one that everyone was at least familiar with to one that only the hardcore enthusiasts or people with a very specific use case want.
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