Baller

A RX-8 with a "slushbox" is like taking a shower with a raincoat on!!!

my10ae

thankd for the comments byebyesaturn!!

MEGAREDS

As noted in the cons section of my prior post... one of the down sides of buying the AT is that you have to put up with a lot of this kind of pablum and don't get the psychic benefit of whining perpetually to your co-workers or staff about what a pain it was to have to shift through the morning traffic when you get to work...

Baller

z

Broker73

shouldn't be in the sports car cat???

what are you talking about? The manual 8 will keep pace with most on he road. The auto is slower, but to say the manual will get killed on the road?? Come on? The acura, G35, older s2000 (not 04) all have similar 1/4 mile times. The 8 is right in there. I often wonder if some on here know how to drive the manual to get the power out of it??
Went for another spin about 3wks ago at another dealership, and the car hauled ***. We went on the freeway, and a new accord was trying to get a look, and the salesman had a grin on his face when I floored it to 9k, and the accord was 4 car lengths behind.

Habeeb

Personally.. If I never have to drive a stick shift again I will consider myself lucky. Autos are the future, standard shift, a thing of the past. Sure, they will still be made available, for the buyers that want them, but see the writing on the wall. One interesting note: Usually, a five or six speed manual costs a thousand or so less that the automatic, with the 8, the auto is cheaper... Mazda also sees the future.. A rotary with automatic shift. did I ever tell 'ya the story of a lttle rx2 four door automatic?

Habeeb

Oh Yeah.. does Formula One still have any manual shift cars, or have they (the future) all gone to computers and autu shift?

Baller

Point taken

Japan8

People who drive Japanese manual transmission cars are just whiners if they complain about shifting. Drive a V8 American car and now you'll find reason to complain.

An F-1 is not automatic as much as you slush box lovers would like to think it is. Do you even know what a slush box is called that? Because it doesn't use real gears as defined by the internals of a manual transmission and you have the torque converter. The F-1 box (and the Ferrari paddle shfit, and BMW and Toyota SMG) use a manual tranmission, with a clutch that is computer controlled. Thus the driver is only concerned with gear change, no clutching... which makes for faster shifting. So no... this isn't an automatic... the only thing that's automatic is the clutch.

G8rboy

I'm curious what RX-8 AT sales are like outside of the US... when I went to Europe on business a few years back I didn't see an auto tranny in any cars. I was overjoyed to get a rental with an MT, not that I had a choice- all of them were.

Is this still the case overseas? or are touring/sports cars becoming more 'acceptable' with AT's?

Japan8

An automatic sports car in Japan is like sacriledge.

An automatic family car or van... or commuter... that is pretty standard. Although at the econo end... 1.5L - 660cc manual trannys make up a decent amount of the market. Auto trannys get worse fuel economy and cost more (the only reason it's cheaper in the 8 is because of the engine difference)...