Rattus The RAT wrote:
> would you buy a good accord with automatic transmission?
>
> I've always drove manual cars, i'm not sure I could adapt to automatic, how
> about you?
>
> RAT
>
>
i was a hard core stick guy until i had a serious left knee injury. so
i had to buy & drive an auto, always with the intention of getting rid
of it when i was healed. but i never did because i suddenly found that
driving in the city was so much more relaxing! seriously, if you're in
stop/go traffic, the stuff where you move forward a few feet then stop,
or have stop signs every block for a mile at a time, automatic is the
only way to go. even on the freeway, if it's an auto with a good shift
pattern, and hondas generally are, they're still plenty of fun. only if
i were hard core looking to red-line it all the time would i drive
stick. i sound like an old fart, but seriously, honda automatics are
really very good. and provided you don't have one of the recent ones
with the reliability problems, these transmissions last forever.

the only thing i would say to qualify that statement is that you've got
to learn to drive a little differently. on a stick, you can just change
gear & go. on the auto, you have to let it know that you want it to
change, and in the absence of tiptronic-type shifters, the only way the
transmission/ecu knows for sure you want to drop gear & accelerate is to
floor it. the ecu detects "w.o.t." [wide open throttle], and signals a
down-shift accordingly. and it has a small delay on that, just in case
of accidental signal blips, but once the ecu registers your intent,
you're off to the races. and it holds that lower gear, [or even
dropping 2 gears] until the red line before shifting, so you can
accelerate hard if you have to. in terms of driveability therefore,
once you get used to the style of giving it more gas than you might
otherwise be used to, auto's are just dandy.

the only downsides are that they weigh a little more and so can be a
little slower, and that the engine always needs to be in good running
order. with a stick, if it's off for some reason, you can compensate
and drive it until you're ready to deal with the problem. with auto's,
you can get bad flat spots in the acceleration if everything's not
perfect, and that can be a pain.