As I accumulate a bit of age and "moss on the north side of the tree", I'm becoming more and more convinced that my father's opinion was correct- - - -"Automatic transmissions are smarter than all drivers, and most mechanics!" It's virtually impossible to get one into the wrong gear. Since he was the first man in Nashville Tennessee to work on automatics, he had plenty of time to form that opinion. There might be a few specialized applications where a manual transmission would be a wiser choice than going with an automatic, but those situations are few and far between, especially when considering the performance of the recent bunch of autos with lockup clutches in the torque converter, and computer controlled shift strategies. They tend to keep the engine running in its most economical and efficient RPM range the vast majority of the time- - - -much more often than driving a manual trans can do.
Jerry
