James Zhang, G10A, RDF International School

Nowadays, automatic cars dominate the automobile market. You can see many automatic cars running on the streets every day, but seldom manual transmission cars. Have you ever thought that driving a manual transmission can give you a totally new driving experience on the road?

In my opinion, every person that takes the driver’s license test needs to know how to drive a manual transmission.

To begin with, a manual transmission is safer to drive compared to an automatic car. The reason why I am saying this is that to drive a manual transmission you put most of your focus on the car and the road.

However, when you are driving an automatic transmission car, you don’t need to shift gears and your hand might do something that is unrelated to driving, which might cause a big chance to crash in a car accident.

Another reason for this is that many high-tech sport cars are often equipped with manual transmission. Many of the coolest sports cars only come with a manual transmission. If customers have the desire for speed, they need to learn how to drive a manual transmission. The dream cars of many people also call for manual transmission driving skills.

Manual transmission can give you a totally different driving experience from an automatic one. Some young people really want to learn to drive stick shifts. Many friends around me often say manual transmission cars are great.

Imagine when you are sitting on the seat of a manual transmission with 300-horsepower engine and shift the gears, the engine roars, and the supercharger excretes flames out of the exhaust pipe; how exciting it is.

For those reasons, I highly recommend you to learn to drive a manual transmission.

You might think it is boring and hard to remember the gears, but after you master it you will realize how important it is.