Because I was renting a car for so long here in France and because the price per day was about half as much and because there are no automatic cars available on Corsica (an island we are traveling to), I had to learn to drive a manual.

First I watched this video:

https://youtu.be/l9HfiYOmsPk

I really liked this guy’s speaking style and he covered all the basics.

It was nearly impossible to rent a car with a manual transmission near me. The closest was Chicago and they were fancy cars that costs several hundred dollars a day to rent plus their website states they can’t be used to learn to drive manual.

So when my mom was here with me, we rented a car one day and she taught me to drive it. Those who read my post from that day know I did burn some clutch but the smell dissipated by the time we returned it and all way fine. Also I did get the general feel for it and was confident (enough) to pick up our next rental alone with the kids.

We are now a couple of weeks in and I’m doing pretty well. One interesting thing about this car is the control panel.

Photo by Cal

Do you see a tachometer? No, me neither. This car has a rev limiter and a upshift indicator, as most new manual transmission cars do, so I guess they figure you don’t need one. With all the noise in the car (kids, traffic etc) it’s sometimes hard to hear the engine to know when to upshift so I don’t mind the upshift indicator. Newer manuals are great at protecting themselves from inexperienced or inattentive drivers.

So far I’ve turned around in tight spaces, stopped going up a hill with another car uncomfortably close behind me, stopped at toll booths, driven in stop and go traffic and parallel parked. I’ve driven in the mountains, in the city, and on dirt roads in the country.

Drivers here understand the challenges of driving stick shift. This means they are more patient if you kill the engine or otherwise take a few seconds to start when the light turns green. They (usually) give you some space when stopped on a hill. I don’t know if it would be like this at home.

Manual cars also get better gas mileage which is a good thing when then gas costs twice as much. Diesel is even less but I found the diesel car to be a little harder to drive for a beginner (the car we had for the first day was diesel but I would need to drive one again to be sure this is true).

I also think the cheaper the car, the better. The one we are driving now has no bells and whistles. This means the screen and functions are all super simple. The first car we had was nicer and also had more functions and displays which made it more difficult in some ways.

So 3 weeks in, am I an expert? No, not at all. I still stall once or twice a day and I prefer not to drive if I don’t have to (but this is also partly about not wanting the rental to get damaged while it’s parked). I very much enjoy the freedom it gives us and that it gives us a place to store some things. I’m also proud of myself for learning something new on the fly. I think it’s very much #unschooling to resist learning stick my whole life until I needed it.