I suppose it is similar to the satisfaction the owner of a mechanical watch gets -- but it's more visceral. You're really becoming part of the machine, and you feel it. Coordinating gear shifting with clutch pedal actuation, instinctively doing it all at the right moment based on what you hear and feel from the engine. Your body and mind are involved, consciously and subconsciously. Now all that is just ... gone.

Also, changing gears myself does not preclude me from listening to audiobooks, as some commenter mentioned. I'm already sitting there operating the controls on the car. Having one more lever and one more pedal does not exactly tax me mentally, or preclude my other senses, not constitute any real effort aside from perhaps an extra calorie or three burned.

You can not compare electric to driving a gasoline with automatic, those still suffer from all the mechanical delays and are imo worse with regards to this as the delay of a gearshift can come at unpredictable times.

Driving automatic/electrics is less physically demanding, so it will allow you to more easily eat tacos while driving (which is much more challenging than eating cheeseburgers).

When you're sat stationary with the engine idling, the gear knob and foot pedals shudder, and there's a slight juddering through the steering wheel. Some might think of this as unrefined, and possibly even agricultural, but I find it actually quite comforting. At such low revs the engine also sounds rather clattery... but I don't mind. At least you know it's still there.

(I had a courtesy car a couple of years ago with an engine that was undetectable while idling - and I ended up not liking it! It was so nice to have my car back, with its reassurring vibrations and its clattery engine sound. People are weird.

(But maybe if I'd have been given a Tesla, with its panoply of toys and its space shuttle-style acceleration, I'd have got over it.)

You have a valid point, but... anyone here misses typewriters? I didn't think so.

Secondly, the word processor does countless things the typewriter cannot do, and does so with an order of magnitude more speed.

The automatic transmission does nothing a manual transmission cannot do (from the end user perspective), other than being ever so slightly less effort, and perhaps a few milliseconds faster in gearchange, which does not matter unless perhaps you are being paid for how fast you can get to the grocery store.

Freed of the tyranny of having to use your left foot for a clutch, what is it that you accomplish while driving an automatic that you could not before?

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I'm way over here!

Hi.

You completely missed my point, which was, that the desire to drive an ICE car is generational.