Stickshift or Automatic?

If you have a shitty auto then sure, auto is shitty. Mine will upshift anywhere from 10,20,30 or 25,60,85 depending on how hard I gun it; for an auto it makes a pretty nice rice rocket. It mostly tunes mileage/power to my mood that way. My eclipse has sportronic (their name for it), and I use the hell out of the engine braking, and trips up/over mountains, but home in flat country I hardly ever use it for driving.

Sticks are nice if you have a sweet setup where you just tap the clutch and pull, or time it so well it needs none at all. I don't know, my friend doesn't let me touch his lancer. Not so hot when you have to shove the clutch on the floor, yank the fucker (still grinding a touch), and half the time you have to double-clutch or it stalls, even in high gears. Old jeeps are shitty for learning.

I've had a van and an early blazer, both shitty autos, but I'd take a shitty auto over a shitty stick still. I admit a decent stick on a crappy car might be better if you like to drive the hell out of it. (Okay, I will admit I killed Blazer's transmission and I had to drive it in some kind of auto-manual hybrid, using 1 & 2, which would kick up to 3 after a while. 80 mph in 3rd was deafening.)

I'd like to buy a CVT sometime, or at least test drive one. I know Toyota's experimenting with adding engine noise in; kitschy, but exactly for the reason that most people gauge speed that way. It's impossible to beat a properly tuned CVT's mileage, but I don't know if they're anywhere near the theoretical limit yet.

Xtreme, you take the test in whatever the hell you bring, as long as it's registered it can be a 1937 packard that needs crank-starting.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Are you kidding, in thirty years a steering wheel will be old-skool. Discrete geared transmissions (auto or manual) will be as much of an anachronism as leaded fuel is now.

There's nowhere I can't reach.