Having grown up and living in Italy, the majority of the cars I've driven are manual, and apparently that's still the standard here around the old continent.
I used not to be a fan of automatic transmission until... I visited the U.S. a few years ago and drove around in a car equipped with it :biggrin: That was the first time I experienced driving 700+ km in one day (VA to NYC) and getting to destination as fresh and relaxed as I had started the trip.
My fav kind of automatic is the authentic old school torque-converter automatic trans, vs. the electro-actuated sequential trans that they put in most of the "automatics" here in EU, which are nothing else than regular gearboxes and clutches operated by a mechanism instead of manually. CVTs are so-and-so but still better than sequential - at least you don't get power gaps between one gear and the other being that there's no actual "gears" - and I've yet to try a WV DSG although it sounds as sort of acceptable compromise.
I can see the fun in driving a sports car around a race track with a manual trans (even though most race cars, including F1, now just use sequential!), but for an everyday drive, especially in heavy traffic like we have over here, I'll never understand people who willingly choose to have to keep shifting a million times a day when there's a way to have the car do it for you. The widespread thought is that automatic is less reliable and more expensive to repair, but automatic has actuallty been around (at least in the USA) since the '40s, so it's far from being some experimental and exotic technology that you can't trust. Besides, not having to continuously shift means you can put 100% of your concentration on the road and both of your hands can stay on the wheel all of the time, which makes for a much safer way to drive.
All in all, if I had to get myself a daily driver, that'd be an automatic for sure. One of my classic cars is, but it doesn't get out of the garage very often
