"When manual transmissions were the norm... shifting gears became imbued with meaning."

"It represented the allure of the road, for all its good and ill, and stood in for the human control of a big, hot, dangerous machine screaming down the pavement. The manual transmission’s impending disappearance feels foreboding not (just) because shifting a car is fun and sensual, but also because the gearshift is—or was—a powerful cultural symbol of the human body working in unison with the engineered world.... [T]he coarse feedback that one gets while driving an all-electronic vehicle might be—or feel—too subtle for a brute human mind. Cars have, in a way, become too good. Human understanding slips off their surface, like ice off a hot hood...."

From "The End of Manual Transmission/Stick shifts are dying. When they go, something bigger than driving will be lost" by Ian Bogost (The Atlantic).

I love my 2005 Audi TT and can't imagine trading it in. For what?

Speaking of the feeling of oneness with tools... here's Meade sawing a fallen tree using a Katanaboy folding saw: