MAY VOTING INCENTIVE UP NOW!!!
April showers brought May flowers! And Puck!
As for this comic…
This whole concept of learning how to drive a manual by playing the Atari arcade classic Hard Drivin’ is based on real life. (I mean, of course it is. Something this stupid couldn’t be fiction.) I knew a guy in high school who needed to learn how to drive a stick shift but didn’t really have anyone willing to teach him, or a readily available manual car. So he went to the arcade and played a ridiculous amount Hard Drivin’. See, that game was a real racing simulator: it had a stick and a clutch and everything. It was quite realistic. Or as realistic as a driving game from 1989 could be, I guess.
For those who are curious how this turned out, apparently his strategy worked. Whether it will work for Colin, though, remains to be seen.
One element that requires a bit of suspension of disbelief for the comic is the very concept that Colin could even find a working Hard Drivin’ arcade cab over thirty years after its release. They’re exceedingly rare. It took some hunting for that guy I knew back in high school to find one, and that was over twenty (cough) years ago. But let’s assume that a carefully curated retro arcade emporium is just a stone’s throw from Colin. Let’s.
I got a good feeling about this? Anyone else goat a good feeling about this? I got a good feeling about this!
Nope. Just you.
my sarcasm detector just blew 2 fuses.
You’ll need to get one with better voltage.
Or just put nails in it instead of fuses.
I tried both. in a semi related note my insurance bill is a lot higher than it used to be.
It’ll be great!
I was born the same year as that game you talked about. weather or not it means something, remains up in the air.
does that game include a touchy clutch?
It’s got a clutch that you can touch. As such.
It’s a good vintage.
This moment was inevitable, yet is still shocking.
Did I ever mention my college friend who drove a manual trani without ever shifting? “Shifting makes me nervous,” she explained, “2nd gear works good enough for everything.”
And something akin to that might well be in the cards here.
Shifting without using the clutch is called “floating” by truckers.
We do it a lot because the transmissions for oversized vehicles are NOT synchronized.
Trying to ‘float’ synchronized transmissions is a good way to ensure early and repeated trip to a mechanic.
Also, ‘2nd gear’ is prone to wasting fuel if one doesn’t go to higher gears.
I learned to drive stick a long time ago, but I never got past the fear of stalling while on a busy street.
Yeah, that seems to be the big peril if the Youtube manual transmission fail videos are anything to go by. Most embarrassing are the dudes who are driving around in their hot sports cars … and stall at the stop sign.
hills… whoever though it was a good idea to put stop signs at the top of the hill drives an automatic.
Hills are easy … just use the parking brake (also know as the Emergency Brake) to hold the vehicle on the hill … provided that your parking brake is good working order. Then release it when you start to accelerate … it does make a stop sign (light) a bit of a 3 handed affair (or 3 foot is you have a pedal style parking brake) … but its really not all that difficult once you do it a few times.
Hills are easy if you are alone. However, too often there is someone behind me who thinks I’m much better with starting in hill than I am.
Dang motor vehicles! They’re nothing but trouble for us unlucky humans! 😉
Equally challenging for unlucky elephants too. 😉
I had to learn how to drive a stick shift. We had two manual transmissions and one car that was an automatic. That car went to my sister. I think that dad got rid of it after I learned the hard way that the people behind you HAVE to stop when you brake.
We went through that turn at 35 mph. How we did not end up in the culvert, a yard or with anything broken is beyond me.
Also, learned that peeling out on a hill makes mom laugh. But you don’t blow an engine downshifting into second gear at 65 mph (over 100 kph) doesn’t blow the motor while leaving a highway.
That was the old reason you learned: because the only car available was a stick shift. Nowadays, no one drives a stick unless they really, REALLY want to. I think the number is around 99% automatic transmission vehicles in Canada right now. My father-in-law wanted a manual SAAB because he loves cars, and guys who like cars seem to like manual transmissions. But I remember that he had to order it and it actually took a while for the dealer to even find a manual version. (He had a secondary unspoken motivation for getting a manual as well: he hates it when other people drive his car, and no one else in the family can drive a manual.)
In Canada, probably. In Europe, no.
I learn how to drive in a manual. As a kid who grew up on a farm in the 90s, I learnt how to drive at age 5 on my dads knee. Then he’d pop the old Ute into 1st gear, jumped out, told me to drive in a big semi circle, then hop on the back to throw the hay out to the sheep.
Good times.
Sheep? Utes? Manual transmissions? That’s the most Australian anecdote I’ve ever heard. God bless you, you Aussie paragon.
I am so unfamiliar to this kind of problem… I don’t know whether I am correct, but it seems not being able to drive stick is a mainly American thing. (Being fully aware this all takes place in Canada, I am mainly speaking about the continent)
Here in Europe there are both types of cars readily available and I for myself never did drive an automatic car. My boyfriend bought an automatic car by coincidence while I still drive stick.
And I learned to drive just about 10 years ago when I was 18/19. Even for teenagers nowadays learning how to drive stick is pretty much the default. Our apprentice is learning right now and just a couple weeks ago she asked us for tips about the shifting
Yes, I know that Europeans love their manuals and think that automatics are for sissies and old ladies. But here in Canada, to put it in perspective only 1 out of every 99 cars has a manual transmission. It’s actually very hard to learn how to drive one because of their rarity. Even buying them can be challenging.
I’m not saying they are for old ladies or sissies at all, please, please don’t get me wrong! It’s just that it’s quite uncommon here to not learn how to drive stick.
No, you were nice and didn’t make fun of me and my fellow non-manual driving countrymen. But I’ve heard so many Europeans mock us and call us old ladies that I’ve learned to preemptively acknowledge the sissy old lady nature of automatic cars in the eyes of Europeans.
Oh, that poor, poor van.. Though it is pretty common to stall a vehicle that you aren’t used to, at least at first.
Colin thanks you for giving him the benefit of the doubt.
My father insisted I brake by using my gas pedal foot, and not my left foot, so I could work the clutch—but I never did learn to work stick.
Just good driving, man. If you have your left foot on the break, you run the risk of hitting both at the same time, and that’s bad. Only race car drivers keep their left foot on the break. They can’t afford the split second it takes to move their foot.
Relax, Miranda will look up at her daddy with her big puppy-eyes and everything will be well! . . . . . . . . . . . . Yes, everything will be well! . . . . . Everything . . . . will be well . . . . .
Let’s just keep telling ourselves that.
I like that last panel.
I bet you Puck can drive stick. But what fun would that be, at least this early in the story. 😀
I don’t drive. So I can’t knowingly discuss manual vs. automatic. All I know is that my mom’s left foot would, at times, itch for a clutch.
I don’t think Puck can drive an automatic OR a manual. We’ve never seen her drive. So you’re in good(?) company.
You would know.
Man, she WAS at a low ebb.
It’s just as well. I’ve been known to tell the person I’m talking to that I’ve just forgot what I was saying. That’s a bad thing in driving.
I have a friend who doesn’t drive who insists that she’s too scattered to be trusted behind the wheel. I guess that’s noble of her. But really, the section of your brain that controls the driving part is entirely separate from the rest of your brain. You just get in the car and the driving brain gets you there. At least that’s how it works for experienced drivers.
And I trust my driving brain. It’s saved my life a few times faster than I was even consciously able to comprehend what was going on.
I’m very curious about my Driving Brain sometimes, as on occasion we miss a turn and keep right on going, or take a turn didn’t need… I kinda want to know where it was taking me.
My driving brain never takes me to unexpected locations, but it will take me to wrong ones. Like I’m going to the grocery store but it’ll start me on the path to work.
Not so much “driving brain” as “autopilot.” The same part of my brain can end up taking me to the Walmart across the street whether I’m driving or walking.
Are you sure that foot is not itching for a brake?
Seems to be a common problem for parents of teens.
Yes.
I’m surprised that a vehicle of that vintage actually has shoulder belts… lol
Which brings up the question of Miranda’s car seat…
(I grew up without car seats and shoulder belts. I spent an entire car trip to Florida crawling around the Oldsmobile Delta 88, from the back seat to the front, all day long, completely NOT annoying my dad or grandfather while they were driving at ALL…)
This vehicle would like NOT have shoulder straps. But I put them on anyway, for safety’s sake. And Miranda’s car seat would likely be a seatbelt-installed front-facing one. We’ll probably see that next comic.
I just assumed it was a retrofit. My dad – in other respects quite retrograde – was deservedly proud for installing seatbelts in our ancient van before anyone else – he’d learned about them as a volunteer fireman.
I kind of assumed the same thing.
In the UK you can only legally drive a manual transmission if you pass your test in one (and you can also legally drive automatics). If you pass your test in an automatic then your driving licence only allows you to drive automatics. I don’t know if the EU (I hate writing that rather than “the rest of the EU”) is the same but it wouldn’t surprise me at all.
Now we are getting more automatics in the UK these days. But they’re still in the minority, though I wouldn’t like to put a figure on it.
The automatics will eventually conquer Europe, no matter how hard they try to resist. There’s pretty much zero benefit to the manual, and the lure of easier living always wins out when there’s no reason not to live easy.
It might take another generation to overcome the cultural prejudice against automatics, but make no mistake: they’re coming for your souls.
It doesn’t bother me in the least to write “in the EU” because if there was ever a disaster waiting to happen, that was it… I don’t know about Europe, because I don’t speak the languages or watch their tv, but Britain is a country whose ideas of driving are Jeremy Clarkson and Mr Bean. The whole joke of Bran driving a car sitting in an armchair on the roof, is only half the joke with an automatic.
I only know of Jeremy Clarkson through jokes that Brits make about Jeremy Clarkson. Still funny, though.
Electric cars will take over before automatics do in UK/Europe, and electrics don’t have a gearbox at all.
I still call that a win.
Looks as though this strip would benefit from some of these musical comments from Hoyt Curtin.
https://archive.org/details/scoobydootheoriginalsessionmasters/01+Track+01.mp3
https://archive.org/details/scoobydootheoriginalsessionmasters/02+Track+02.mp3
Wonderfully atmospheric.
They enhance a good mystery…
I had a stick shift for years. My wife managed to back it out of the driveway once. The memory of it haunts her to this day.
“Keeping the wife from driving your car” seems to be a prominent motivator among stick shift owners, I’ve seen.
Speaking as a Brit who has driven manual transmission cars for as long as I’ve been able to drive, I quite like automatics and I’ve owned them occasionally. I can even drive a manual Land Rover while wearing wellies, which is a character building experience… there is a British joke about people who don’t have experience, hiring vans and lurching all over the road (because van clutches are really quite different from car clutches) so the idea of Colin learning to drive on an arcade game, then getting in a van, is pretty funny on that level too.
Yeah, this is all around just a disaster waiting to happen.
Which is my favourite type of disaster.
Van clutches used to be very different, 40 or more years ago. These days vans of that kind of size drive just like cars, the only thing you have to watch out for is the large size. Of course the Mystery Machine probably is 40 or more years old.
This is likely not an actual vintage van.
The front bench seating and lack of head restraints say it is a moderately vintage van, since neither of those have been legal for new vehicles in developed countries for 20 years or more. Unless it’s artistic licence, or the owner modified the seats to make it look more like a vintage van.
I think “artistic license” is the right answer. 😉
Also, I’ve never seen the arcade game but one of the big motoring schools (most people in U.K. learn to drive by taking lessons) used to operate very basic simulators to teach people who really had no clue, the basic idea of coordinating the throttle, clutch and gearstick.
The arcade cab was a like a real race car seat, with clutch and everything. They were really the first to go hard on the driving realism thing, long before Gran Turismo and all those other racing sims.
To turn the whole joke inside out, my elder son was was about 11 years old when someone bought him a Playststion, and he was a big fan of racing games. He couldn’t understand why I couldn’t manage these games (I still can’t) – because I could only drive an actual car, I couldn’t drive with my thumbs….
I had the reverse. When I was learning to drive, I was an expert at driving with my thumbs but found the wheel clunky, cumbersome and awkward.
As a pedestrian, I am glad for automatic transmissions making it easier to drive safely. ( I live in a city with a reputation for bad drivers and it may be justified.) 😉
Word.
I couldn’t even BEGIN to guess which city you’re talking about.
As a former trucker, I can name (with straining) at least 20 cities with 1 million or more residents that would fit that description.
I meant “without straining”.
Come to think of it, who is this Manuel Transmission and just how long his Colin been driving him?
Brother of Pablo Transmission. One half of the famous Tumbling Transmission Brothers.
Well, I learned to drive with automatics (early 1970s) and entered the US navy driving such.
But, when I went to trucking school, they had ONLY manual transmissions for the big rigs.
I watched carefully the training films and other students trying to shirt.
When it was my ‘turn’, the instructor asked me if I had driven big rigs before (my shifting was flawless).
I told him I learned by watching everyone else’s mistakes.
He didn’t believe me.
During my career driving trucks, I also ended up learning to drive/operate forklifts, cherry pickers, and other ‘heavy construction units.
Each time, I was accused of already knowing how to drive/operate the things.
(((shrug)))
You are one of those magic machine men. It is all second nature to you. I am envious.
As a 10 year old at school I forgot I had to learn a poem to recite in class. As the teacher picked other children one by one to recite it, I gradually learned the poem. I was a bit worried no-one would make it to the end but a couple of them eventually did. The two children before me were hopeless, and I remember thinking “have you not been listening?” I was chosen last, I was word perfect and I even got some of the rhythm of the poem (I was playing musical instruments by that age). I got top marks and an invitation to join the choral speaking society. To this day I can’t understand how the two kids before me were so terrible, they had more than 20 examples before them to learn from.
I don’t know. Maybe stress. Maybe they figure that they’re supposed to perform, so they don’t bother with other people’s performances. Maye it’s just boring.
I learned to drive on a Ford industrial tractor when I was about 12 years old.
That’s hardcore.
ROTFLMAO! This is my my ’85 Ram50 is safe from theft…even when the keys are left in it year round. 🙂 Manual. I learned running a manual motorcycle (500cc 2 cycle) when I was 10. After that cars is easy, trucks to. Poor col.
Great security feature.
Coming to a convention near you, Headliners Cybertronic Spree with openers Smell of Burned Clutch
I love those guys. Wish I wasn’t locked in my house.