A few decades ago you may have had a point. But guess what - an automatic transmission is smarter and better than anything you as a meatbag can do. You may have more direct control over your transmission, but you're shit compared to a machine.
I will concede that automatic transmissions are--within the last 5 years or so--finally approaching the fuel economy manual transmissions have give drivers for decades. However, until my car can read my mind, I prefer to control when my car shifts. Without traction control or the like, you can prevent a car with a manual from slipping on ice by putting it in a higher gear, etc... Traction control has it's uses but in certain situations--muddy, rutted roads for example--it's also a good way to get stuck. The road I live on is crap. It's a sloppy mess every time it rains and it takes the plow several hours to get there after a snow storm. Having the extra control is nice.
It's the same mentality as people who are against anti lock brakes.
Anti-lock brakes are great on the highway or on a paved surface. Compare anti-lock to non-anti-lock on a gravel surface some time. On gravel, assuming it is not too loose, you can stop faster by intentionally locking the brakes.
Or people who hate fuel injectors and want carburetors.
I can replace the entire fuel system in any of my carbureted cars (including the fuel pump) for the price of the fuel pump alone on your fuel injected car. When you have to start diagnosing and replacing sensors on an EFI car using the guess and check method--the diagnostic computers don't work worth a shit. ever.--your repair bill can get out of control very quickly. I'll stick to the simple to troubleshoot and cheap to fix carbureted solution.
And don't tell me how bad my fuel milage is either. My '72 Volkswagen Type 3 automatic gets 35MPG and my full-sized '54 Plymouth with a 3spd manual gets 25.
Or people who demand to crank their engine manually.
[humor]With a crank a dead battery or starter will never leave you stranded.[/humor] Seriously though, sometimes a simple solution--while a little bit more work--is more reliable in the long run.
Any automatic transmission can disconnect the engine from the drive wheels by shifting into neutral or park (go to neutral so you keep power steering). There is no safety issue.
Wrong. Many newer cars use a drive-by-wire system to shift the transmission. I stopped to help a lady whose Prius got stranded a couple of months back. She was having some sort of electrical trouble and it took 20 minutes of fooling around turning the key on and off and pressing buttons to get the damn thing in neutral so we could push it off the road. The owner knew what buttons to press, but the computer refused to shift the transmission.
A manual transmission is by no means more reliable (indeed, it is subject to idiots manually wrecking shit up), and in many cases is not even cheaper any more.
Wrong. Manual transmissions do not need coolers in the radiator or coolant lines. Loss of coolant from a ruptured line or a damaged radiator can quickly kill any automatic transmission if it is not noticed right away. Automatics are a lot more complicated both electronically and mechanically and simply have more parts to fail. A manual transmission won't stop working because of a broken wire but a modern automatic (made in the last 25 years) will.
Performance and fuel economy benefits are slim at best, and are typically only there because manual transmissions are more finely tuned, and often have an extra gear vs the automatic counterpart, specifically in order to sell to gearheads
Or they have the extra gear because it is not as costly to install as it would be in an automatic and it results in better fuel economy.