Originally posted by biz-engineer I don't know the exact figure, but in Europe, 90% of people prefer to use manual gear shifting, the overall consumption is less and it is quicker to adapt depending on terrain (mountains etc). There is a parallel with camera, I was hiking for 4 days in the Alps with the Pentax K1 on one battery that still had a one bar charge indicator after taking 300 exposures. If I had a mirrorless camera, I'd need to recharge it every day or bring four batteries.
I've driven car with manual and automatic transmission. It was a matter of getting used to each kind of transmission. I shift gears manually without thinking about it. It's just that over a week of driving on vacation with an automatic gear shifting car I spend 50 Euros more refueling.
There is a parallel between Eye AF, car auto-transmission and GPS, mobile phones, they all appeal to laziness, and when you use them you can't seem to be able to do without anymore because you lose skills. It's like buying frozen fish and meat at the supermarket, it is so easy that people don't even know how it can there, and if there was an electricity blackout for 6 months, most people in the cities would be incapable of feeding themselves...
People nowadays are like greenhouse plants.
Most modern cars are only slightly more efficient with manual transmissions. Maybe a mile per gallon or three. I think it's unlikely that you'd save 50 Euros in a week of driving. If you drive 1000 km you'd spend in the neighborhood of $200 Euros on petrol. So the manual would have to be 20% more efficient. 25 mpg instead of 20. That's on or beyond the outer limit of what's plausible given today's 8- and 9-speed automatics that are tuned for maximum efficiency in most cars. In actual driving the efficiency of a manual is almost certainly less than published figures, because while the computer shifts for efficiency, the driver of a manual transmission often doesn't.
In any case, I like manual transmissions, I drive one every day. But calling anyone who drives an automatic, or uses GPS or Eye AF or mobile phones lazy, and the equivalent of only eating TV dinners is pretty snobbish. We all pick and choose what we want to be helped with and for what we'll give up conveniences. I'm sure we could find some oldtimers who'd laugh at your choices to flip a switch for lights, for using the internet to get information, for driving a car with fuel injection that never needs to be tuned... Drawing a bright line at Eye AF and manual transmissions is a subjective choice, no more lazy than 1000 other choices you've made.