{"id":474681,"date":"2010-03-23T15:24:33","date_gmt":"2010-03-23T19:24:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.caranddriver.com\/?p=17524"},"modified":"2010-03-23T15:24:33","modified_gmt":"2010-03-23T19:24:33","slug":"david-e-%e2%80%99s-take-automatic-ferraris","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/474681","title":{"rendered":"David E.\u2019s Take: Automatic Ferraris"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"David<\/a>I really enjoy shifting gears manually. I also enjoy shifting gears manually without using the clutch. It absolutely blows the minds of pre-teen grandchildren. A car that will forever stand at the top of my Automotive Pantheon is a Ferrari 250 GT Tour de France. It belonged to a friend named Bill Pearce who was in the automotive film business, doing training films, promotional films, and the occasional commercial. Bill asked if I’d like to drive the TdF for a weekend in 1960. One thing led to another and I drove that car more or less regularly for more than a year. It was crude and noisy and it had a triangular fake-ivory shift knob with an equally fake jewel in its center, and every hour spent driving it was a preview of heaven.<\/p>\n

Now Ferrari has spoken sotto voce<\/em> to trusted journalists and friends-of-the-firm that manual transmissions are declared obsolete and future Ferraris will all feature automatics. The Ferrari California will be their last car with a clutch and a shift lever. There is something wrong with this picture. Could it be that as Ferrari has worked harder and harder to produce two-passenger parade floats for fat-ass fop non-enthusiasts, the percentage of greaseballs in that target market who actually know how to shift gears has slipped below acceptable levels?<\/p>\n

Thank God there’s still Porsche.<\/p>\n

Related posts:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. David E.’s Take: What Luxury Should Be<\/a><\/li>\n
  2. David E.\u2019s Take: Why Toyota Should Think Small Again<\/a><\/li>\n
  3. David E.’s Take: GoDaddy Goes Badly<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    I really enjoy shifting gears manually. I also enjoy shifting gears manually without using the clutch. It absolutely blows the minds of pre-teen grandchildren. A car that will forever stand at the top of my Automotive Pantheon is a Ferrari 250 GT Tour de France. It belonged to a friend named Bill Pearce who was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6414,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-474681","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mobile","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/474681","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6414"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=474681"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/474681\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=474681"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=474681"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=474681"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}