Where does adventure live in our safe, electronic future?

Photo by Michael Mroczek on Unsplash

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We’re all familiar with the gratuitous use of sonically embellished gearshifts in every Fast and Furious movie. It’s become something of a joke, the way drivers urge more speed from their cars by selecting an extra gear like a card shark smugly smacking his cards down on the table one by one.

Of course, we all know that shifting gears doesn’t make the car go faster. In a stick-shift, it’s actually the opposite: shifting gears disengages the flywheel from the clutch plate, creating a lapse in the transfer of power between the engine and the wheels. Torque dips as the engine claws its way back from the power void at the bottom of the tach to the near-redline apex of its velocity and noise generating abilities.

Still, that satisfying tactile kuh-klunk of the gearstick slamming its way through what appears to be a billion-speed gearbox is evocative. The offbeat bellow of a cross-plane V8, the squeal of tires, the tactility of the manual transmission… it’s raw, and it’s primal. You want to be that chisel-jawed young man careening in a state of suspended catastrophe through a crowded city centre. You want to be the one stomping the clutch pedal and sweating into the soft Alcantara steering wheel.

I know I do. I feel a little bit heroic every time I get behind the wheel of a stick-shift, rear-wheel-drive car and leave the traction control behind in haze of my own tires. Every trip to the grocery store feels a little bit exciting when I’m drawn into the experience by the pursuit of a perfect heel-and-toe downshift.

It saddens me that all this and more slowly bleeds out of the automotive industry. Low-slung, mean-looking sports cars such as the Jaguar F-Type and the Alpha Romeo Giulia Quadrifoglio are only available to North American consumers with automatic transitions; four-wheel drive and undeterrable electronic traction control systems supplant mechanical rear-wheel-drive setups in more sports cars every year. The raw, red-blooded driving experience has been pasted over with warning labels.

I know that every new generation of driver-aids makes our roads safer. I know that Elon Musk’s Teslas are making our skies greener and our cities quieter, but in a perverse way, that only deepens my disappointment. I don’t want to die in a collision with an over-exuberant Mustang driver who is in the process of learning the dangers of lift-off oversteer the hard way, but I’ve always found something terribly irksome about the phrase ‘better safe than sorry.’

Sometimes, the whole world feels too safe. Sometimes, every aspect of my life feels too sanitized, too anodyne and predictable. Sometimes, I just want to get behind the wheel of a car and feel like my spine has been bolted into a 3000-pound lump of metal being propelled into the distance at great speed by exploding petroleum, kept from disaster only by the deftness of my mechanical sympathies. I applaud the technological advancements that make our lives safer on the roads, but I wish it didn’t come at the cost of that raw sense of adventure.