<VV> PG - Further opinions

Gary Swiatowy gswiatowy at rochester.rr.com
Sun Jun 6 22:04:59 EDT 2010


This past weekend....
Took the 66 Monza on a short vacation.
110 four speed.
I could not begin to count how many times I had to shift that car at stop
lights, through towns etc.
And I was thinking about that as I also have automatic PG cars.
My opinion is, you have to be able to actually "think" about the operation
of your vehicle, instead of pushing down on a gas pedal.
Is that a bad thing?
Too many people these days just drive, oblivious to actually operating their
vehicle.
Yes, I had some sore clutch feet.
But I knew how my car was operating, and could use the excersize.

Gary Swiatowy

From: "Mark Corbin" <airvair at earthlink.net>

I was going to mention about the Chaparral. I recall it was no slouch on
the race course. Then you covered it with your answer to Jim Houston. But
it still puts qualifications on your analysis. But besides racing, how
often does one use that during everyday driving? Which is why I said that
to me, a manual is 90% work and ONLY 10% fun. And maybe I was being
generous?

Second point, though. You described the automatic as "low-tech". If that
was the case, then manuals are positively stone-age. At the start of auto
production, all cars had manual transmissions. It took them several decades
to develop a workable automatic trans. All a manual trans is is a bunch of
gears and a clutch plate, whereas it takes some doing to do what an
automatic does. So an automatic is anything but "low-tech".

Or were you refering just to the Corvair Powerglide? If so, you are right,
to an extent, considering that its competition (Ford and Chrysler) never
offered an automatic with less than three speeds, even on their cheapest
cars. GM hung onto the two-speed Powerglide for much longer than they ever
should have. Even the Corvette used it up until '68. You have to remember
that the Corvair was designed way back in the late '50's, and that at first
even it's manual trans had only 3 gears, and the first gear wasn't even
syncronized. About the only thing you can conclude is that the Powerglide
was cheap, bulletproof, and it worked. And the public obviously didn't
care, as long as they didn't have to screw with a clutch.

If you notice, the 4door still has a manual in it. Drove it today, in fact.
It'll probably remain a manual, for now. Until I can't push a clutch pedal.
Then it'll just be a matter of unbolting the manual stuff and bolting in
the automatic stuff. The manual stuff will be boxed up and set on a pallet,
in case the next owner wants to reconvert it back to a manual.

-Mark





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