In Defense of the Third Pedal
Whatever moves a car is the carmaker's business. What the driver is permitted to do with it is ours, and the clutch is being shown the door without anyone asking the driver.
This week Jaguar ran prototypes of its Type 01 through the streets of Monaco. The car is electric, a four-door grand tourer, and the company promises it will move like nothing else on the road. We record the news. We will not be drawn into the argument the news invites.
Our quarrel this morning is older than any battery, and it has nothing to do with what fills the tank.
Let the record show where this magazine stands, which is nowhere, and proudly. Electric, gasoline, diesel, hydrogen, a windmill bolted to the roof: a car is a tool, and a tool is judged by what it does, not by what it eats. The combustion partisans and the battery evangelists may keep shouting at each other across the parking lot. We have no dog in that fight and never will. We are interested in the driver, and only the driver, and what is quietly being subtracted from the act of driving.
A skill is not a feature. You cannot reorder it from a catalog once the factory has decided you no longer deserve to have it.
The thing being subtracted is the manual gearbox.
Consider precisely what walks out the door with it. Not a checkbox. Not a sportier alternative for the enthusiast who pays extra. The third pedal is the last instrument in the modern car that demands something of the person behind the wheel and rewards them for getting it right. Heel and toe, the bite point found by feel, the gear chosen a half second before the corner arrives: this is the one remaining negotiation in which the machine waits on the human instead of the human waiting on the machine. Call that obsolete if you must. We call it skill, and skill is the only thing separating a driver from a passenger who happens to be facing forward.
Nobody put this to a show of hands. There was no announcement, no defender stood up, no ballot was printed. The clutch is being discontinued the way unprofitable things are always discontinued, in a quarterly review behind a closed door, and afterward the public is informed that it had stopped wanting the thing it was never offered the chance to keep. We have read that script before. We did not believe it then either.
Watch how a thing of value disappears: never in a single theft, always by erosion. One spring melts a glacier no more than a degree, and then the river is gone. The hand crank went, and we managed. The choke went, and nobody mourned. The clutch is next, and we are told, as we are told every time, that it is a minor thing, scarcely worth the ink. Of course it is minor. Everything is minor on the day it is taken. That is the entire trick.
So this magazine will say what the order sheets will not. A skill is not a feature. You cannot reorder it from a catalog once the factory has decided you no longer deserve to have it. The manual transmission is not a museum piece and it is not a costume; it is a competence, freely available to anyone willing to learn it, and competence taken from the public does not come back.
When the last new car sold in this country can no longer be had with three pedals, we will not let the date go unremarked. It will run on this masthead in black. We will name the year, we will name the model, and we will name the executives who signed the memo, so that the people who did it cannot later pretend they merely watched it happen.
Yes, this is an argument about a pedal. Yes, there are larger sorrows abroad in the world. Spare us. A reader who will shrug while the small things he loves are quietly carted off is a reader being trained to shrug at the large ones. The line has to be held somewhere, by someone, and this magazine elects to hold it here, with one foot on the clutch and no intention of lifting it.