Comment Re:Just give the option to turn it off... (Score 1) 823
I'm not discounting that modern technology hasn't drastically improved efficiency in automatic transmissions. I'm sure it has. I'm just saying that manuals have the ability of being more efficient by virtue of being simpler and lighter.
The added weight of the actuating devices in an automatic will lower your efficiency if nothing else. I understand that they've come a long way, but there are *still* losses when automating things. All things being equal, the manual transmission simply has to be more efficient, if for no other reason than it weighs less, so for a highway trip with the same payload over the same road, manual will win, even if by a very little bit.
Now if you don't drive the manual correctly and don't choose perfect shift points, you might induce more inefficiency than an automatic, but that's about driving habits and skill and not the efficiency of the transmission. Plus it may be that for city driving, no human can be accurate enough with the shift points to stay within an automatic computer controlled modern automatic, but again that's about the ability of the operator, but on the highway with the cruse control set, a manual will be better.