Originally Posted by wstar

^ I get that. There are a lot of drivers who just enjoy the Manual experience. I think "will never understand" isn't necessarily true. I drove a 6-speed car exclusively for a decade before buying the 7AT Z, and often made some of the anti-automatic comments seen in this thread. I can drive a stick pretty well (well, perhaps that's questionable now that I haven't touched one in 4 years!), I just don't want to anymore.

That's why I run it in M-mode 24/7 - I'm used to picking my gear, and I prefer to pick my gear. I know what gear the car should be in based on the situation, and a regular automatic in D-mode doesn't and never will. All an automatic gear-selector can see as input is "Hey we're travelling at 57mph and the engine's at 3,300 rpm and the gas pedal is at 3/8ths", it doesn't know things like "And he's about to make a sudden left turn under braking, so let's predictively move down a gear before we do, so that we have power on tap at the turn's exit, but we don't have to upset the car downshifting mid-corner to get that" versus "And we're about to cruise steadily at this speed for the next mile, let's move up a gear to save fuel and heat".

The act of choosing your gearing is integral to driving a car fully. The act of operating a manual clutch is just an artifact of the mechanism for switching gears.