Have You Ever Encountered a Stick Shift?

If you’re here, you probably have more than a passing interest in the manual transmission. And, depending on your age, you may very well have grown up with a parent owning and driving a stick-shift vehicle. Maybe it was a cool car owned by a relative that would be taken out for summer cruises. Maybe your friend in high school drove one. Even as manual transmissions continue to fade in the new car market, I wager that most people have at least one past encounter with a stick-shift. 

For me, my first experience was not in learning how to drive one. I only learned how to properly drive a manual just four years ago. Still, I’ve had an appreciation for the manual transmission for most of my life. I fondly remember my parents’ five-speed ‘92 Subaru Legacy wagon. I can still hear my parents rowing through the gears. As a little kid obsessed with cars, I loved the thrill of feeling the car’s engine wind up, the clutch going in, shifting, and the lurch of the car as it popped back into gear. To most others, it was a family wagon with cloth blue seats and wind-up seat belts on the doors (who here remembers those??). To me, though, it may as well have been a racecar. 

It was the closest I would come to that race car feeling, as this Legacy was the last car my parents ever owned that had a stick shift. When I was in 4th grade, they traded the Subaru in for a brand new 2002 Honda Odyssey. While the Odyssey had a VTEC V6 engine, it didn’t have all the mechanical excitement of the five-speed Legacy. (I had plenty of fun with that VTEC Odyssey later on when I could drive, but that is a story for another time). In the Legacy, I was totally engrossed in what the car was doing. I watched my parents work the gear shift and would anticipate the next shift with excitement. It wasn’t a performance car, but to my 8-year-old self that didn’t matter. The manual made each drive an event, and I missed that feeling after the Legacy was gone.

Some of my favorite memories of the car were when my parents would pull up next to our neighbors’ fire pit, open up the back hatch, and lay out blankets for my brother and I to sprawl out on. It was like our own little fort, only in hatchback form. We would eat s’mores in the car, watch the flames, and eventually fall asleep. The Subaru (or the “Sub-a-doo” as my younger brother would call it) was a fixture in our early childhood. Beyond it being my first experience with a manual, it was the base camp for so many family adventures.

What was the first manual-equipped car that you remember? Maybe you even learned to drive in it. Tell us in the comments below! In the meantime, I am going to keep waiting for a mint ‘92 Legacy wagon to show up on Cars and Bids.