Re: I was cranked to a fifth gear

On 1 May 2007 17:24:20 GMT, Blinky the Shark <no.spam@xxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

the Omrud wrote:
msb@xxxxxxx had it ...
Most consumer automobiles that still use standard (= not
automatic) transmissions...

A usage I always find annoying. "Standard" should (I say) be used to
mean "not optional". A non-automatic transmission is a manual one.

In the UK, manual transmission is standard on perhaps 90% of cars ((by
number of actual cars) sold. A few, mostly very large, cars have
automatic transmission as standard. For the others, it's a option for
which you have to pay.

Also, historically there were manual transmissions for a lot of years
before automatics arrived on the scene, so the language had decades of
the standard transmission being a manual.

Semi-automatic gearboxes, without a clutch, have been around for quite
a long time on expensive cars. One of the cars I learned to drive
with was a 1936 Daimler drophead coupe which had a pre-selector
gearbox. You moved the gear lever to whichever gear you wanted and
then pressed a button with your left foot when you wanted to change to
that gear. I expect that there are earlier examples.

One of the neatest, in terms of being clutchless and yet allowing the
driver to decide when to change gear, was the first new car I ever
bought, a Citroen CX2000 in 1975. You simply had a conventional gear
lever and no clutch. The car changed gear as you moved the lever.
--
Robin Bignall
Herts, England
.