I know I’m smack in the middle of blogging about my trip to Japan (it’s taking forever) but there is a list of other things I wanted to blog about so rather than wait, I’m going to just do this now.

I read on Autoblog today about an article about manu-matics, or automatic transmissions that can be shifted like a manual. To be honest, I always thought these were a bit of a waste of time until we got our MINI Cooper. My boyfriend and I both have a “car” but right now neither car is really “mine” or “his”. We take turns driving the cars… often. The MINI was the first time our wants and desires were conflicting. I wanted a manual transmission, he wanted an automatic, as he can not currently, nor does he wish to learn to drive a manual. The compromise was the fact that the MINI’s “semi manual” automatic transmission. I’ve had cars before with the semi-manual automatic that really was quite useless (to be honest our Volvo XC70’s is an example of this.), but the MINI’s automatic tranny is actually quite nice. You can actually feel the car downshift to use the engine to slow the car and the shifts with the “manual” mode are quick and exact. I almost always drive the car in “manual” mode and the only problem I’ve had is that when I first started to drive the car, the direction of upshifts and downshifts felt “backward” to me.

To shift up, you pull back on the gear lever, toward you, which to me felt backward because in my mind you move “UP” thru the gears, true you pull back to go from 1st to 2nd but you push forward to go from 2nd to 3rd. Now that being said, after driving for a year in the car, it actually began to make sense to me and I prefer it. Pulling back on the stick while accelerating feels more natural and pushing forward while braking is definitely better, that being said I wondered what the reasoning was behind the different shift patterns used by car manufactuers and apparently so did Road and Track. Today they have a story on their site [link] asking just that. They actually went and asked several car companies their reasoning. Check it out if you are curious like i was!