Who pissed in your cornflakes then
Has your Cavalier even got ABS on it? Mine didn't. If any of the things on my car packed up, I'd still be able to drive and handle it, when I did my apprenticeship on the buses, it was company policy that anyone who would ever have to drive a bus for what ever reason, had to go through their driving school for training. When it was time, I had to go out for a day with a load of other trainees who were being trained to be full time PSV holding bus drivers. They all took a turn in the driver's seat of a double-decker while I sat and waited. We pulled into Braintree depot and had lunch, after which the instructor said it was my turn in the seat and I got to drive back from Braintree to Chelmsford depot in the snow. The instructor went straight to my mechanical superintendent and asked him what was the big idea of sending me over to the driving school, he said that he had never seen driving skills like it and that I from that point on cleared to drive . When there was a broken down bus and the mechanics were already out in the breakdown truck, I'd get sent out with a replacement bus so that the driver could transfer his passengers to it and continue the journey. I'd have to effect whatever repairs were needed to get the broken bus driveable and limp it back to the depot. I never failed to get back unaided.
The Vauxhall Cavalier I owned in the late '80s indeed predated ABS.
And you are only proving my point; you were taught how to drive without all the modern crap, as was I. Consequently we do know how to react when things go wrong. Modern drivers, for the most part do not, and frequently only find out that fact at speeds we would have struggled to reach in similar conditions, in the vehicles of the day.
Ditto. And you would be surprised how many Americans, even folks my age, have absolutely no clue how to drive a manual gearbox. Present a typical driver with a vehicle with 3 pedals and it's total panic. Automatic transmissions really started to take over in the 1960's and many folks never had to drive a stick and never learned.
My father was "old fashioned" and all his vehicles were manual gearbox. So it was either learn how to drive it or walk. I learned and initially I hated it and wanted a car with an automatic but found out in due time that automatics were unreliable and not much fun to drive.
So...fast forward to today. There's only a select few cars in the American market that offer a manual transmission. The Civic still does. And if I happen to have someone in the passenger seat who never learned they are fascinated watching me row the gears but also remark that they want nothing to do with it. Can't drink coffee and eat a donut if you have to change gears.
And....no one EVER asks to borrow your car.
Well I don't know about the US but over here we have 2 types of driving licences, A/ Manual boxes and B/ Auto transmissions. Type B is only allowed to drive AT's but pass the type A driving test, and you're OK then to drive both classes and I think it is true to say that today more people hold type B licences.
In the early days auto boxes were not only expensive, but they were unreliable, so most people went for manuals, these days the cost of an auto is less and so autos used to be the domain of big luxury barges, but they have come full circle, they are generally more or at least as reliable and in some cases the manual versions are sold at a premium. With the modern DSG autos, they are faster and just as fuel efficient as a manual box variant. As mentioned in an earlier posting, I'm used to driving big buses and also trucks when the used to have crash boxes and were much harder to change gear than modern synchromesh boxes as this short film shows. It was also possible with care to change gears without using the clutch on them, but it took a lot of skill, and you had to listen to the engine note, something which I did with the older buses.
While I was working on the buses, they introduced the semi automatics that needed a different style of driving as this film shows.