Well the preselector gearbox was a fascinating concept. The Tucker also had one (it was literally just a Cord's transmission). But I think it fell out of favor for a couple of reasons, at least in America (which typically led the world in automotive stuff back in the day). First, the preselector was generally a complicated setup that lent itself to being a 'luxury' option for a car, well, only something available on one expensive car in America, anyway. Cord went out of business in the late 30s, I believe, and when the time came that some other companies might make their own preselectors, they were a little busy building tanks for the war. After that, they were really trying to get by with the old shit they had before the war. But then, automatic transmissions started becoming available, and those became the luxury option, so there was really no need (from a business point of view) to justify selling preselectors.
Another is that purely on being a complicated electromechanical contrivance, it wasn't particularly reliable. Then several companies (I believe) like Chevy, introduced vacuum power assisted shifting, so that took the effort out of shifting (although that fell out of favor, as well). And after automatics took a foothold in the market, manual transmissions really got delegated to being the 'cheap' option, or rarely, the 'sporty' option, neither of which are suited to a fancy preselector.
All that having been said, though, the concept of a preselector is really cool. And part of me does wonder why it never caught on in europe/notUS, because automatics didn't catch on there for a long time. Still, even, it's uncommon. Not sure.
Anyway, more to the point, don't worry about shifting a manual. Literally the easiest thing in the world. And it's clutch > shift > release clutch, so not at the same time, exactly. Now being able to work the clutch and the gas pedal at the same time, in order to get moving... now that's the hard part. But like anything else, you'll learn, and you'll be an old pro in no time at all.
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Originally Posted by init4fun
Now I'm sure some are gonna argue that the modern automatic is very close to the performance of a manual...
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I will! Only a of couple things:
A: There is a reason most drag race cars have automatic transmissions. Because what tiny amount of power you lose in the torque converter right off the line (and it's really not much with a high stall racing converter [not to mention there is a bit of slip in a clutch right at takeoff anyway]) is easily made up for with the near-instantaneous shifts. Something that's quite literally impossible to do as fast with a manual shifter and clutch.
B: Cars made within the last couple of years are extremely liberal with the torque converter lock-up. So much so that it's on basically all of the time. They do this to meet fuel efficiency requirements. Even so, in an ordinary car - anything short of a race car, anyway - there's really no practicable difference in performance or efficiency, between a manual or automatic.
But I don't really know anything about motorcycle automatics. Didn't even know they had autos lol.