Who will miss the manual car when it’s gone? Only the very smuggest drivers

‘Driving is about to tumble from general purpose adulting to niche, nostalgic hobby.’ Jeremy Clarkson in an Aston Martin in Bucharest, 2009. Photograph: Ana Poenariu/AFP/Getty Images

You can do whatever you like when you’re reviewing a car, because the cultural standard was set by Jeremy Clarkson. You’re almost expected to ding it. I once took a whole hubcap off a Toyota Hilux and pretended I’d done it off-road on a caper, when in fact I’d backed into a pillar in a car park. The Hilux was somewhat longer than I realised; watch out for that.

This being the case, I’d been doing the job for years without a moment’s anxiety, not even when I took a Ferrari California T on the Isle of Wight ferry and its internal alarm thought it was being car-trafficked. And then I found myself in a Fiat Spider on a winding Italian road (lovely little roadster built off the Mazda platform) and I’ve never been so stressed in my goddam life.

The problem was, I had a spectator. It was a press trip, we were in pairs, taking turns to drive. People who think of themselves as car enthusiasts, natural born drivers, only mean one thing: they really like changing gear, at exactly the right time. It can be rough or smooth, a box or a bang shift, it’s like jazz, it doesn’t really matter what you do so long as you make a convincing case that you did it on purpose. These drivers make noises with their mouths about handling and torque and whatnot, but all they’re really talking about is how good they are at a manual. There is no gear-changing style that’s good enough for these people, short of also being really good, which I am not. They stare at you, agape, when you’re slow or cautious changing gear, and God forbid you wait for the car display to tell you that you should be shifting; why are you even in a car if you don’t love the engagement and control?

It should go without saying that my driving partner at the time, a career-long car critic, was probably the best gear-changer civilisation had ever seen, but what he didn’t have was a poker face. He winced as if in physical jeopardy whenever I changed gear, which was at first too often, then later, not often enough. The quality of my driving fell rapidly to the point that, between the winding roads and my sweaty, maladroit hands, I began to feel that maybe we were both in danger, and ceded him the wheel for the rest of the day.

So it’s drivers like that who have my thoughts and prayers, as the DVLA announced this week that 20% of driving tests are now taken in automatics, and only 29% of registrations last year were of manual cars. I don’t personally give a stuff what other people drive, but if you have a fair wedge of your identity pinned to being good at a thing that people are no longer even bothering to learn, that’s bound to sting.

Most people can see the sense of going automatic: it’s awesome how many driving lessons it takes to become even mediocre on the clutch. Electric and plug-in hybrids are all automatic anyway. Car future looks increasingly driverless, even if that technology is farther away than has been claimed. Car club membership might still be almost entirely (87%) a London thing, but various factors – sustainability, and the fact that no one has any money – are likely to push up demand in the medium term, and it will make sense for those fleets to go automatic if that’s what a fifth of people are learning.

So it’s left to What Car? magazine to worry about driving becoming a “lost art”, as it did when the DVLA figures emerged, its consumer editor, Claire Evans, commenting: “Any enthusiast will tell you that for sheer driving pleasure, manual gearboxes always win.” She’s not wrong about that. The basis of the joy is the deeper relationship with the car: you have to listen, really listen, to it, with your feet and hands as well as your ears, and in return it will be more responsive to you, the acceleration will be better, everything will feel smoother and more elegant.

But it’s not just about pleasure, really, it’s also about pride in one’s own excellence, and in order to truly revel in that, other people have to be bad at it. Driving manual is about to tumble from general purpose adulting – at which everyone should excel, but only some people do – to niche, nostalgic hobby, which you find out by accident someone’s great at and wonder why. I’m going to go with “not the end of the world”, but what do I know? I drove all the way to the vet in first, once, because my dog was asleep on the gear stick.

Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist