If you're a person who likes cars and has been on the internet, you’ve probably heard of Le Brown Manuelle Wagonne or something to that effect; a meme poking fun at the weird groupthink tastes of (Western/Americanized) car culture that was supposed to be satire. Now, beige is back, wagons have all but been discontinued as normal transport but are the hottest of hot commodities in performance cars, and Ferrari has created a fake gated gearbox literally called the Manuale. Our collective obsession with shifting is shifting into some really strange places.
Nostalgiapathy: modern sickness of the mind, characterized by a largely baseless longing for the past, without understanding why past successes were successful
Do you guys not think any of this manual worship is getting kind of weird? Like a weird mix of car-centric puritanism and signalling your like-minded conforming to the obvious superiority of a manually shifted transmission? Do you notice that everyone reiterates the same talking points over and over (bro, the clutch engagement, bro the feel of the shifter in your hand, bro) as if no one has had these ideas before? Do you not think it’s really weird that big companies are getting in on this bizarro hype train?
It’s all Nostalgiapathy. It’s a modern disease that’s plaguing our minds via an arbitrary longing for the past. Not to say that certain parts of the past aren't worth longing for, but we can't very well move forward while looking backward. It’s the reason why all movies are bad sequels or remakes, all fashion is on ever-shorter fad cycles reviving trends that deserved to stay dead, and why culture and creativity generally seems to be not only stagnant, but consuming itself.
Nostalgiapathy has a distinct effect on the car world, and I want to explore and unpack specific symptoms that I’ve noticed in the world of cars. I was a Nostalgiapath myself, and don’t get me wrong, I love old machines and I have a fondness for aspects of the way we was, but I know first-hand that those old machines are not always charming to live with, and I know for sure that the way I was was… flawed, and I’m happy to have grown, if only slightly. There are positive lessons to be taken from the past, but we should be looking forward, and ideally not hating everything new, for the sake of our sanity.
In the previous installment of Nostalgiapathy, I talked about the Honda Prelude, and that while you're allowed to not like it, it's a good little car and anyone who says it's "not a real Prelude" is deluded. This time ‘round, with the recent revealing of the Ferrari 12Cilindri Manuale, I thought it was high-time to tackle the obsession around shifting. I started thinking about this when automakers starting implementing "shift points" in continuously variable automatic transmissions to sound less terribly unhappy, but we're in very different territory now.
How can you please a purist with that which is purely artificial?
This new Manuale should prompt the biggest inflection point of manual purists. Ferrari has gone to enormous lengths to simulate a fake gearshift to please prospective clients, purists who demand to be physically involved in a simple mechanical process that has been effectively automated for years. I ask you: how can you please a purist with something that is purely artificial?
Ferrari is not the first to do it. I don’t blame them or think less of them for making this happen. BMW was and still is tinkering various permutations of the simulated shifter, as is Porsche. Saab actually had something vaguely reminiscent of this in production years ago, and they discontinued it because it was fake and weird and nobody in the 90s liked it, just like when Porsche and Volkswagen had a very similar system in the 60s. This isn’t new stuff, but it is a new aim; what we’re moving towards isn’t about simplifying as was the case before, no, this is performative complexity for the sake of it. Now, we’re adding steps, rather than removing them.
Someone had to be the first to try it in our modern era, and it’s logical that it would be Ferrari, given the very loud reverence of their traditional gated manual transmissions. It’s all about the gated gears, bro. When someone asks about a manual Ferrari, they don’t ask if it’s manual, they ask if it’s gated.
Is it a gated car, bro? No? Ahh, yeah no, not for me bro. Gotta be gated, bro. It’s worth the money bro. It’s parked money, bro.
I think this whole modern fixation of DIY shifting kicked off with the Porsche 911R in 2016. The then-new “991” 911 GT3 had recently gone the way of the PDK, which made a lot of sense, because the GT3 hadn’t quite devolved into fashionista-investment status at that time, and it was supposed to be a performance-focused 911 designed to excel on a track. It followed that letting the monkey in the driver’s seat manhandle the gearbox was leaving performance on the table, so it made sense to eliminate that. This made everyone very mad.
Porsche then introduced the 911R; essentially a limited-run GT3, with retro racing stripes, retro houndstooth seats, a retro ducktail spoiler, and, most importantly, a retro 6-speed manual transmission; this last part was especially interesting because at that time, their manual was a 7-speed, meaning they developed this just for the limited-production 911R. Surely there were no plans to continue with it…
And continue with it they did. The 911R almost immediately began commanding serious money on the second-hand market, and Porsche decided they wanted some of that money (can’t blame them, honestly) and introduced the GT3 Touring; effectively a regular production 911R, complete with Le Manuelle gearbox, which they’ve since made a mint on. Don’t fool yourself thinking any of this is altruism to please you, the noble enthusiast; this is business, and business is never altruism. And, definitely don’t think Porsche was the only company that could smell the money.
Anyway, back to Ferrari…
Ferrari is not the first to try this, and I don't blame them for making it happen
I do find all this gatekeeping of the gated shifter kind of amusing, because the gated shifter was designed specifically to be slow and bad. Many, many years ago when Enzo Ferrari himself had just started fielding his own cars in Grand Prix racing, he had a recurring issue with failing gearboxes. He and his mechanics tried to tell his drivers to be a little more mindful of how they were treating the car, but those drivers - legendarily talented, madly driven men like Alberto Ascari - were rarely concerned the nuance of delicate shifting when victory was on the line.
Vittorio Jano and Aurelio Lampredi, genius engineers who were instrumental in helping put Ferrari on the map, came up with a means of forcing the drivers to soften their handling of the transmission. It would railroad them into being slower, and take a more specific path that was easier on the internals of the fragile gearbox. This invention was, of course, the gated shifter.
I like gated shifters; they’re difficult and weird. I also happen to enjoy things that are difficult and weird, but it doesn’t change that a gated Ferrari shifter is difficult and weird. All those same devotees of Le Manuelle, who pretty much all agree that the Mazda Miata and/or Honda Civic Si/Type R are the gold standard of shifter feel, bro, would probably hate a gated shifter - if, of course, they weren’t predisposed by fear of heresy - because they are the exact opposite of what constitutes a likeable modern manual.
They’re literally clunky and they do not have a satisfying, tactile notch; if my Miata went into gear like a Ferrari 355, I’d be worried that someone stole it and broke my synchros. Don’t get me wrong, gated gearboxes are interesting, and quite satisfying to master, but they are about as far from objectively good as you can get; literally difficult by design.
gated gearboxes are interesting, and quite satisfying to master, but they are about as far from objectively good as you can get; literally difficult by design.
The other thing that gated gatekeepers miss is that, like Porsche tried to say with the 991 GT3, there does come a point where shifting, where manually taking over an automated process, takes away from the car. I have had the very rare privilege of driving both a F1-style (paddle-shifted, semi-automatic) Ferrari 599, and a gated manual 599, within a few days of each other. I can almost guarantee that you, dear reader, don't have that same point of comparison available to you. Believe me when I say: those cars should be automatic.
I liked the manual car because manhandling a 600-plus horsepower supercar like that - a 599 GTB is not a soft GT like a lot of people think, they are weapons - was one of the most visceral driving experiences of my life. I think about it a lot. I also think it scared me.
That car is way too fast for a meatbag to clink-clink through gears effectively. The engine is too responsive and revs rise and fall way too fast. The only way to drive it fast and semi-smoothly is to absolutely smash the gears as fast as you can, which is a) abusive and not okay b) very difficult to not fumble by getting caught on the gates - which are, again, designed to slow you down - and c) a monumental task when you are trying to negotiate exiting a sweeper as fast as a 600-plus horsepower supercar will allow.
You have to have driven a very fast car to understand what I’m getting at (...and it’s easy to tell when someone hasn’t). The F1-shifted 599 on the same road made way more sense, and more importantly, felt right. I used to despise older paddle-shift systems like Ferrari's earlier F1 transmissions and Lamborghini's E-Gear, and then all of the sudden I stopped wanted to die on that hill because I didn't want to literally die while ham-fisting a bullet of a car. Being able to click a paddle and have the car slam-bang a lightning fast shift is still really fun, feels theatrical, and it's more in line with the car’s psychotic character.
This is why Hyundai copied sequential shifting with their 600-plus horsepower supercar, the Ioniq 5 N. Hyundai was famously the first company to make a really fun EV by adding simulated gearshifts, and there was a lot of skepticism about that at the time; Porsche was dismissive of it, but have since relented and followed suit, because the market demands more shifting. Lexus has joined the fray as well.
Is it more or less incredibly inauthentic when fake gearshifts are implemented on an EV?
Is it more or less incredibly inauthentic when fake gearshifts are implemented on an EV? I’m inclined to say less fake, because it’s all software, and software isn’t real anyway. Said software uses out-of-the-way paddles on the back of steering that were going to be there anyway; it’s a lot less of a statement than redesigning a centre console and designing a shifter setup that did not need to be there, on display and in the way, anyway. It’s an elaborate creation from a simulation car racing rig in a car.
I also can’t get over the knowledge that a lot of people spent a long time developing the modern dual-clutch gearbox so that it can shift gears with supernatural speed and smoothness to enable the insane performance capability we've become spoiled with. That mechanized genius is there, in the car, capable of doing things you couldn’t do with all the skill in the world. And I’m supposed to be pleased that I can now interfere with its operation?
I’m a pretty handy cook, but I would never walk into Marco Pierre White’s kitchen and tell him how he ought to make me scrambled eggs. I am not so egotistic as to deny myself a world-class breakfast (and piss off a master of his craft) to satiate my urge to micromanage. That would be insane.
The muddiness of what is and isn’t more or less inauthentic only gets worse when you consider that many real manuals have been bastardized by bad calibration for years. What does the purity of a shifting experience mean anyway? For anyone who’s had the misfortune of being a regular reader of mine, you’ll know I have frequently and openly been very critical of manually-shifted vehicles that are, for one reason or another, poorly calibrated.
I wasn’t terribly upset when VW canned the manual in the GTI because it wasn’t very good (I am so sorry, Thomas). One of the most annoying experiences I’ve ever had in a press car was sitting in traffic in a Subaru BRZ, and trying to figure out how to smoothly drive around its awkward throttle mapping. I was incredibly disappointed in the otherwise excellent Nissan Z because its rev hang was so bad that it completely ruined the car for me - and I found it all the more baffling that Nissan has been doing it for decades and seems to think it’s fine.
The sole purpose of a modern manual is to offer enjoyment via connection, but that connection has been adulterated, often quite heavily, in most vehicles, for a very long time.
Long before I started driving modern press cars, I remember not being able to really connect with my now-lauded, golden-era 90s BMW, because it had a tiny bit of shifting disconnect in the form of a (new for the time) dual-mass flywheel and a hint of throttle intervention, whereas my clapped out 80s BMW had no disconnect whatsoever. The directness of connection really matters to me.
Either way, the manual’s merit of mechanical reliability, and the benefit of heightened efficiency (and therefore, performance) has been lost to time, leaving the sole purpose of Le Manuelle, to add enjoyment via connection, but that connection has been adulterated, often quite heavily, in most vehicles, for a very long time. If I’m being made to go through the motions of a connected experience without actually having a real, enjoyable connection, why am I going through the motions at all?
This exact rationale is why I (to my own surprise) much preferred an automatic Charger to a dumbed-down manual Challenger, and why I loved the (at the time) auto-only Nismo Z and couldn’t stand the manual Z Performance, even with Nismo goodies. As much as I like to applaud car makers giving us the choice, if you’re not going to do it right, don’t do it at all. This is why I barely care about #savethemanuals, because there are/were a tiny number of car makers that know how to really nail it.
I’m willing to bet the Manuale Ferrari will be very good. Without being beholden to an actual shift linkage, without having to make a complicated machine feel haptically pretty, they can just focus on hitting the tactile notes people claim to like, and it’ll end up feeling better than almost every manual car made in the last twenty years - especially since everyone’s frame of reference is the dulled manuals from the last twenty years or so. It will be good. It will be more real than the reality we’re accustomed to. But it will not be real.
The Ioniq 5 N’s shifts aren’t real, either. But laughing my ass off while playing with it was real. Ditto goes for the Lexus RZ550e, which to be honest, I couldn’t have cared less about, until I discovered the silly gimmick of the fake shifts Lexus baked into it, and then that millennial-grey commuter appliance suddenly had a sense of humour that I could engage with.
I am concerned that we we are so afflicted with delusional Nostalgiapathy that we can’t see it for what it is; It’s just driving with extra steps.
I still have apprehensions that we’ll look back on this era of fake shifting as being a very cringey fad, but increasingly, I am concerned that we won’t; that we collectively are so thoroughly afflicted with delusional Nostalgiapathy that we can’t see it for what it is. It’s just driving with extra steps. It’s like when the corporate Tex-Mex restaurant I used to work for had the brilliant idea to remove salt, pepper, ketchup, and hot sauce from tables, so that the guests would have to ask staff for them, to create more “opportunities for positive engagement.” It’s a sham.
Sidebar:
...if y'all were really concerned about pursuing the height of driver-machine involvement, you'd just get a motorcycle - where, by the way, quick-shifters that bypass using the clutch to shift are very popular!
And if it should come to pass that we decide we’re okay with the sham, that we’re fine with roleplaying as “real drivers” and making a game out of it, the same way we look the other way on sloppy contrivances in movie scripts in exchange for fan service, that’s all okay, if, and only if we can admit we know it’s all for the show, and we enjoy for what it does to our feelings, because what we feel is real and does matter.
If we can admit it’s fun for the sake of fun, and that we know it’s fake, it’s probably fine. If taken seriously, the point gets lost entirely, and we all become bizzaro Nostalgiapthy-infected fools, who have a strange evangelical devotion to a non-essential pedal and lever, and how cringe is that? There is a place for the manual gearbox, an authentic manual that's an integral part of a driver's car, and those should be celebrated for what they are, but we should be celebrating more than just one characteristic. We are not defined by one thing, nor should the cars we love.
#savethemanuals. By all means, save the manuals. But, once in a while, ask yourself why.