There’s so may good reasons to drive a manual transmission: more engagement with your car, giving your sorely neglected left foot a job to do so it doesn’t grow despondent and turn to foot-drugs like Dr.Sholls-cocaine, the ability to do a burnout, and so much more. And, yes, there’s a security advantage, too. Because fewer and fewer (or, less and less, if we want to piss off David) people know how to actually drive stick, having a manual transmission car can make it somewhat theft-proof. This was demonstrated in Germantown, Maryland just recently, as a couple of ne’er-do-well teens tried to carjack a Subaru WRX, only to have to retreat in shame because they didn’t know how to drive a manual transmission.
There’s video of the whole ridiculous failure, even, so let’s watch and laugh at these dipshits, because it’s the only way these little bedwetters are going to learn:
Sure, you feel all tough when you’re yanking an owner out of their car, but that quickly dissipates when the cold reality of your own ignorance reaches up and squeezes your carjacking ‘nads.
Here’s what the Montgomery County police department had to say about the attempted carjacking:
The investigation by detectives determined that the adult male victim finished pumping his gas and attempted to enter his car when he observed the juveniles running towards him. The juveniles forced the door open, grabbed ahold of the victim and demanded his keys. The victim complied with the juveniles’ demands. The juveniles entered the victim’s car and attempted to drive away. Unable to drive a manual transmission, the juveniles exited the vehicle and left the scene on foot.
I wonder if the owner may have suspected that the carjackers – who were only 16 and 17, jeez – wouldn’t know how to actually drive his WRX. The teens were eventually caught after a short foot-chase.
Here’s what baffles me: if you can’t drive stick, those two kids picked the absolute worst vehicle to try to carjack. Subaru WRXs have some of the highest take rates for manual transmissions of anything on the road. We’re talking like 79% manuals. Seriously, this was the worst possible choice. I know the kids today maybe don’t knowhow to drive stick so much, but they should be able to at least Google, right? Dummies.
What kind of shitheads carjack someone, anyway? You don’t mess with a person’s ride. You just don’t.
(Via BoingBoing)
Does the wannabe “driver” run back to the victim and return the keys before running off??? If so, that is quite nice compared to them taking them and dropping it in the trash somewhere.
My jeep is totally getting the “Millennial Anti-Theft System” spare tire cover with the 6-speed tree illustrated on it.
LOL My neighbor has this on their Jeep. I get a chuckle every time I am walking the dog past and read it
I’m 45 and I know a ton of folks from my genaration that could never drive a stickshift. It’s not just the young kids, of which millennials are now mostly in their 30s.
So much for sticking it to the man, eh youngsters?
Learning to drive a manuel is so easy, why do the americanos think it is not? My son (13) got it right the 1st time, in a LandRover from a friend, on a offroad track, my friend only having said to release the clutch slowly.
It’s not hard, but where are you going to learn? No one has them, so there’s no way of teaching their kids.
I learned on my first car after I bought it, and many of my friends that ended up driving stick either learned on their first car or a friend’s first car. But those cheap civics/saturns/Kias probably had a 25% take rate on manuals in the 90s and were available to us in the early 2000s. They were probably 1% by the 20-teens.
I planned to hold onto my 96 Cherokee long enough to teach all the nieces and nephews how to drive stick. It didn’t work out (aging parents, needed a 4 door), but I was willing to do that. And I didn’t bother locking it for the last few years I owned it, because ..
And this article topic is how I started reading the old site, and then David and Jason, and here I am.
I’ve taught 3 people to drive, and made them all learn stick first. Of course, it helps to give them some golf cart or tractor background for steering and braking. In college my trusty SL2 was the way most guys in my dorm learned how a clutch worked. I wonder why my slave cylinder went out just a year after graduation?
If you or your son ever have trouble learning something I hope someone has slightly more helpful advice.
No one’s out here expecting you to spell “manual” on the first try.
I’ve always thought this would be a terrific deterrent, but nice to see it in action.
I leave my Golfs running all the time while I do quick errands. Not only are they manual, but, being VW, you have to depress the shifter towards the floorboard before you can put it in reverse. So I park where the car will have to be reversed out, and worry not.
I’ve won two bets against people (who knew how to drive stick, but weren’t car guys) that thought they could back my car out.
Hahaha. Yes, I was confused as hell the first time I tried to put a VW into reverse. Then I ended up owning one and it became second nature to push down for reverse.
I was baffled the first time I encountered that, although some older American iron had floor mounted shifter you had to push down to move. My BWM was confusing the first few times with the hard crash to the left for reverse. Also enjoy Volvo and Kias that have the little ring you have to pull up to get in reverse.
It was the opposite for me having always owned VW’s I was aware of the push down to get in reverse. When I worked at a car dealer I encountered a car that you didn’t have to do that but you had to lift up a trim ring on the shift knob to get the lever in reverse I was like what the F is this?
Ford Focus with the upgrade engine, I presume?
I had a 2001 Focus ZX3 that I used to deliver pizza in. Just left it running. Good luck anyone figuring out you had to lift the ring on the shifter to get it into reverse.
Yup, way back I had a roommate with a manual Jetta. We had three “stacked” parking spots, so if you were the first home everyone else would park behind you. I had a manual truck, but trying to back out his Jetta was an exercise in frustration. Ended up putting it in neutral and pushing it out of the way enough to get my truck out.
In my opinion, if you can’t drive stick, you shouldn’t even be allowed behind the wheel of a car. In my country you can’t get a driver’s license if you can’t drive a car with a manual transmission.
I’m with you that I think it’s a valuable skill because it teaches a new driver a lot about car control. BUT, despite the fact that my car has always been stick, and many of my friends are the same, MOST Americans don’t have access to a manual car to learn on. And in the case of the few that do, most of those cars are sports cars which aren’t really an ideal instrument for teaching.
When my wife’s youngest daughter got her license a few years ago I offered to give her my Subaru, free and clear. The Subaru, of course, is a manual. No thanks. Ungrateful kids.
If the owner had a Cobb shifter and Stage Two upgrades, he could have reversed away from the pump before the shitheads could even get the door open
I wonder what life lesson these misguided youth will take away from this:
Carjacking is bad.I should learn how to drive a stick so I can be a more effective carjacker, avoid humiliation, and possibly avoid arrest.
I believe insurance companies should lower rates on manual cars while they are still legal
“Where’s the D? Where’s the D?”
“Nothing here but numbers. This car is broken! The left brake doesn’t work!”
I hope and pray they make some nice friends in jail.
Another reason why I won’t buy an ICE car without a manual.
Kids these days, no critical thinking skills, no work ethic.
If you’re going out with the intention of stealing a car at least watch a video of how to drive a stick first.
What better way to learn than on someone else’s car?
I mean, at least try.
I think this falls similarly in line with the recent discussions about Hyundai/Kia thefts I’ve had with people.
At a high level, people assume these cars are getting jacked to get brought to a chop-shop or put on a container and shipped out of the US. The reality is that it’s mostly teenagers with zero plan what they are going to do next other than drive around the block a couple times and leave it parked somewhere. And I would imagine that type of behavior isn’t generally drawing the “best and brightest” of the generation.
Not only couldn’t they drive the car, I doubt they could even start it.
Dear Autopian Forum:
I never believed this would happen to me. But it did—someone tried to jack my M3, and after numbly staring at the shifter for a few seconds while I berated him for apparently not knowing how to drive a stick, the miscreant crawled out of my car and ran away.
What?! Please do tell us more.
Ouch–he’s too young to get a Penthouse Forum joke?
Perhaps he’s too pure, as pure as the driven, rust tinted snow.
Downtown DC, 630 pm. Midst of rush hour! A Jeep Grand Cherokee bumps me from behind at a stop light. I (a fool) get out to chat with the guy — and secretly I’m kinda psyched because this means I can get the dings my kid put in the bumper when she was learning to drive fixed on someone else’s dime.
I leave the engine running and even worse leave my phone on the charger. The Jeep’s driver is expensively dressed but young, and acting a little weird. He points to my bumper, asking if he caused some damage—but weirdly he’s not pointing at the part with damage. He is, though, pointing to a point that makes me lean down.
At which point I hear my own door slam and I realize very suddenly what is actually happening. I’m expecting the car to race off immediately, thinking about my phone and all my other crap in the car. I start to run back around the car, waiting for it it just take off.
And it…doesn’t. It just sits there. By this time I’m back around to the drivers door, and I’m kind of loudly narrating the whole thing unconsciously— like, “goddamnit you’re stealing my fucking car, what the fuck” and when I get to the driver’s door I see this dude sitting frozen in the front seat, staring at the controls like it’s the frigging Space Shuttle. Just mystified.
So in the split second I’m not really thinking about whether this guy could have a weapon. I’m just astonished as it occurs to me that this guy can’t drive stick. Can’t even begin to fathom what to do.
And so I start kind of berating him, like “oh are you fucking kidding me, you can’t drive stick, can you? What the fuck? You’re trying to steal my car and you can’t even drive it?” That kind of thing. And I even started just telling him come on, get out of the car, this is a waste of time.
He looks at me, eyes as big as saucers. He kind of halfheartedly stabs the throttle a couple of times, then he decides to bail by crawling out of the car through the passenger seat.
In the process of doing so, he loosens the hand brake, so as he crawls out the car starts rolling backwards. I’m standing there now thinking I have a very different problem now as the car rolls down the hill. The door is still closed and in any event I don’t want to get run over by my own car.
Fortunately, dude number 1 still hadn’t moved the Jeep. So the BMW rolls back about 3 feet before hitting the Jeep and stopping. At which point, I get the door open, dive inside, and pull forward…to the light. Which is now red again.
As I’m struggling to let the adrenaline subside and trying to deal with the absolute miasma of weed stench this guy left behind, the dude in the Jeep whips around, picks up his accomplice, and bangs a right on red.
The whole thing took less than a minute. Probably less time than it took to read this.
I think about it and wonder even if they could have driven it, what these guys were planning to do. Go for a joyride in DC rush hour? My commute sucks! There was nowhere to go!
excellent use of vernacular to enhance the post!
As much as I like that my manual VW CC is its own theft deterrent it can be a bit annoying when you’re somewhere that only has valet parking. There’s usually “the one guy who can drive stick” but soon that’s guy’s going to be extinct, too.
Some of us solve that problem by staying miles away from any establishment that only has valet parking.
Oh, yeah, I avoid it like the plague, but every so often it’s the only option (I’m not the only one who gets to choose where we go).
Once about 1998 when my only car was a ’68 Galaxie convertible the battery cranked its last while parked across the street from a restaurant with a valet stand. One of the valet dudes came over and asked if I needed a jump. He sprinted off and came back with someone’s car, we jumped the Galaxie, and I was on my way. He said they do it all the time. Thanks, anonymous person who didn’t realize your valet parking included consenting to jumping other people’s cars.
I have routine appointments at the local med center, where there’s major construction going on and all of the normal parking lots are closed. They’ve contracted the parking out to a valet company, whose employees drive your car off to God-knows-where while you deal with your appointment. When I get my (MT) car back, the guy driving it is inevitably a 25 – 30 year old with a big grin on his face, who gets out and compliments the car. There are still a few good kids out there!
As I found out recently, there’s a chance none of the valets can. I arrived at night at a hotel with valet parking only and the night valet came back with my key and asked me to park it; then in the morning there were 2 (different) guys in the valet booth and none of them could drive stick. I made fun of them a bit (“you’re like pool guards who can’t swim, haha! did you not know that this job would require some driving?”), went back to the front desk and asked them what are they charging me “valet parking fees” for.
I ended up not having to pay those.
I’ve also had this sticker on my car for years now:
https://i.ibb.co/bJ4xw60/MT-sticker.jpg
When I got my inspection sticker, the mechanic asked if my car was a manual (yes) and if I could drive it in. My new favorite guy. I much prefer that to some kid at the tire place who claims he can drive a manual because he can kind of move the car using its drivetrain—revving to 5k and slowly easing out the clutch to keep it from taking off.
In a way, that’s nice… But isn’t it a bit shameful to work on cars for a living and not be able to operate a manual transmission?
Second to last hotel i stayed at only offered valet access to the hotel garage. Checking in was no problem. Checking out on Monday morning took an hour – they had to bring an older valet in on his day off to retrieve my car. In Detroit of all places. The last hotel, i didn’t even bother, dropping the bags with the doorman, and parking in a municipal lot five blocks away (smallish city that didn’t allow street parking downtown after midnight).
There is no mention of a weapon, but I can’t get the scene from Gone in 60 Seconds out of my head.
Donny Astricky:”You lazy, half-ass bully! Any asshole can pull a gun on somebody! You don’t know the first thing about stealing a car! Boy! You need a role model!”
That is why I call my manuals the anti-american theft device.
At the last dealer, none of sales people could drive it, so they asked me to move it around the lot. Once the service techs got in, no issues.
I’ve had this happen taking my car in for tires. I end up being the one that drives the car into the bay, because no one else there can do it.
I had a similar situation happen to me a couple of weeks ago. Only it wasn’t at a gas station it was at Discount Tire and it wasn’t a car jacking so much as it was the tire guy couldn’t drive stick and had to have another employee pull my car in and out of his bay for him.
Fixed.
As someone who lives in DC, the fact that the thieves were 16 and 17 surprises me very little. If anything they’re on the older side, I’ve heard of kids as young as 11 or 12 boosting cars…and I used to do a fair amount of work with the juvenile courts in the city so I’ve seen a lot of this firsthand. I worked with a kid who had a GTA conviction several years before they could even apply for a learner’s permit.
Unfortunately these kids are really vulnerable and get used for dirty work a lot….and it doesn’t help that DC has taken police out of the equation for most vehicle offenses. Not that I’m advocating for MOAR COPS as some sort of solution here, but all traffic violations within city limits are handled by cameras now…so once a car is stolen from a neighboring area like Germantown it’s no longer hot once you’ve crossed into DC.
Teens driving fast cars like maniacs on our local roads is something my wife and I see pretty much every commute. It’s really dangerous and unnerving. Basically we’re dealing with a lot of social ills in the area right now and stuff like this is a symptom…then add in the fact that once they cross state lines they basically can’t be held accountable anymore due to MD and DC refusing to have any sort of reciprocity and business is booming if your business is stealing cars.
I’ve honestly thought about switching my daily to a manual for this reason. My wife and my neighborhood is pretty quiet and we have a driveway/clearly have a Ring doorbell Big Brothering over the cars, but we both work in rough parts of town, so who knows what might happen during work. But then on days like yesterday it takes me 50 minutes to go 5 miles due to how hellish the traffic is and I can’t even begin to imagine how infuriated I’d get having to constantly shift between neutral and first the whole time.
Anyway, I’ve gotten off track here. I’m glad these kids got embarrassed like this and manuals have become a legitimate anti theft device. Honestly I think I’m the only person in my entire friend group who can drive stick now that I think about it. When you live in a big city in this day and age it’s an art form that’s been left far behind.
Give that weak ass these kids get used a lot. Sure gangs use them because less likely to do time but any 8 year old knows wrong from right. Government stopped allowing parenting but substitutes public schooling as the solution but the poor teachers cant do anything either because stupid childless rich people from both parties donate and get to decide but they are clueless. You notice the rich peoples kids do it to but get off because it was a joke. Here is 10k to not prosecute.
Yet another video that would benefit from the old Benny Hill backing music.
No video ever benefits from “Yakety Sax”. Not even Benny Hill.
It was already played out long before The Benny Hill Show ended.
NoEvery videoeveralways benefits from “Yakety Sax”.Not evenEspecially Benny Hill.fify.
Yakety Sax!
Think I’ll market a line of fake clutch pedals that attach to the brake and stick shifts with a boot that sits over a shift knob to act as visual deterrents to clutch-challenged thieves. Maybe imbed a taser in the fake shifter, too.
nelsonhaha.jpg
https://www.epicgifs.net/images/show/PCMWN8A4
Dodge Vipers, of course, have a 100% take rate for manual transmissions.
So did Fiesta ST, Focus ST, and Focus RS. No automatic option.
Don’t go leaving the Hondas outta this. They deserve credit for the Type-R
If I remember right, the GT500 was manual only for a long time (of course now its DCT only)
Correct, the 07-14 GT500 was manual only.
The GT350 from 15 on was also only manual.
Ford has historically put a lot of manual-only stuff out there, vs. GM who has always offered an auto. But all the stick-only Fords are gone, while GM still has a bunch of performance offerings with manual options. So take from that whatever lessons you want.
Yeah, kind of like how in 2010 the Mustang GT was the agile one with less horsepower and the 2010 Camaro SS was the pig that was only good in a straight line. And then the seemed to switch places over time. Funny how that works.
The Civic Si is also manual-only.
And S-2000!
The porter at my local Honda dealer didn’t know how to drive a standard and was shocked that my 2020 Civic Sport hatch had a 6MT. I had to wait 20 minutes for the only tech that could to come back from lunch to get my car. The porter said, “I thought only Si’s and Type R’s came with a stick!”