[spellboots]

There are economic and regulatory factors involved, it is more complex than people being resistant to change which no doubt makes up part of it.

In the UK, for example, automatic cars are more expensive to buy and insure [1]. They also tend to be more expensive to learn how to drive as instructors mostly have manual cars to teach with.

This incentivises new drivers towards manual cars, especially as younger drivers are more likely to be in lower-paying jobs and therefore more price conscious.

There is also a separate license category for automatic cars. If you have this license you are not allowed to drive manual cars, whereas the manual license entitles the holder to drive both. Therefore most new drivers opt to learn manual for the flexibility and the cost reasons.

1: https://www.moneysupermarket.com/car-insurance/automatic-car...

[yywwbbn]

I find it hard to imagine it would take significantly more than 15 minutes for most people to ‘learn’ how to drive an automatic car even if they only drove a manual before.

[falcolas]

Muscle memory is a bitch. Two things I’ve done going from a manual to an automatic, sometimes a year after:

Slam on the brake as if you’re using the clutch. Automatic brake pedals are more than wide enough to accommodate two feet, and attempting to upshift and slamming on the brake instead can really rattle your brain bucket.

Throw the automatic into park. Less of an issue these days, but it used to attempt to actually go into park, with the shenanigans you’d imagine there would be as the parking pin attempted to engage with the forcefully spinning gears.

[robryk]

The UK authorities agree with you: if you pass the exam with a manual car you can use both, but if you pass it with an automatic one, you can only drive automatic ones.

[icoder]

I'm not saying it's hard (I had to, given the automatic rental when visiting the US), but it's not just about learning how to do it, it's also about reflexes, which you don't unlearn in 15 minutes. Sure you can learn to consciously suppress them, but the habit of finding a pedal with your left foot when accelerating/decelerating lures behind it for a lot longer.

[michaelt]

Somewhat surprisingly, in the UK Autotrader lists 230k manual cars and 195k automatics

So the fraction of manual-transmission cars in the UK is much lower than I would have expected.