JudasIscariot: Also, American roads tend to have variable speed limits. In one town where I lived you would have a 55 mile per hour speed limit then it would change to a 45 mph limit and then 35 BUT if you were in a school zone and school is in session then you had to slow down to 25 mph and under. Doing all that with a manual would be seriously annoying.
Matruchus: Actually this is quite the same as here. City/town whatever generally 50 km/h, then one street is 30km/h, next one 10km/h being a pedestrian zone :) You get out of town is first 70km/h sign, then a couple of hundred meters after that you get 60km/h, another 70km/h sign after that and then after around hundred meters again 50 and after that you can finally go 90km/h but then you get to next village and its again 50km/h :) so yeah I know how that is :) Constant gear shifting.
It really depends where you live but normal driving time from home to job in Europe is now more or less between 0.5-1 hour eitherway.
But yeah definitely driving long hauls without automatic transmission is taxing but then again I never drove anything else then cars with manual transmission so its hard to understand. Eitherway tried once to drive a car with automatic transmission but couldn't figure how to get it in to gear so I just gave up.
As a mechanic I ended up learning how to drive stick so I could test drive cars I worked on and I just could not switch to manual as I could drive, eat, and drink a non-alcoholic drink while driving an automatic transmission automobile and you can't do that with a manual :P
The one thing about manual transmissions is that they are MUCH cheaper to maintain and perhaps replace than automatics since they tend to be less complex than automatics :)
