My wife and I dislike both our cars. They're older than average, they're externally unimpressive, and they're internally unimpressive. So long as we remember to take anything of value out of them, we don't give a fuck if they get stolen. The only hassle would be the insurance paperwork and finding a suitably average replacement vehicle.
They also don't mark us as the type of people that have anything worth the effort and risk of stealing.
I'm currently on holiday and so we're driving a much more modern car than either of ours, and what I refer to as "the distance from the road" is noticeably further than our two cars.
What I mean by "distance from the road" is the number of layers between driver action and machine reaction. Changing gears in a manual is a direct, instantaneous (pending a crunch and grind) process from driver action to machine reaction. Pressing the accelerator in an automatic has always had a noticeable lag, for me at least, being raised in a manual. In this much more modern car, there's not just the auto-lag, there also seems to be a choice the car itself makes in what it feels like it's an attempt to be maximally efficient on fuel, in restricting acceleration. It really feels there's more a layer of software in addition to the acceleration auto-lag.
The end result feels like an unpredictable rate of acceleration as I increasingly convince the car to "fucking move you piece of shit" whilst attempting to enter traffic at a decent clip. The car ends up massively over-revving in a low gear/band and then almost skipping the next two gears to settle into the normal 60 - 80 kmph zone.
This "distance from the road" is bothersome to me, but may be (much?) safer for the majority of drivers who aren't used to being so "near the road".
Vale the manual car!
(If you can't drive a manual, you lack the concentration and skill required to safely drive any car on a public road. It was an appropriate and effective barrier to entry whose absence is a threat to every road user)
Another boon of the manual car is that you are probably not likely to have a lead foot and find yourself speeding. In an automatic with a lead foot, the gears shift for you and suddenly you are going 50mph, but you cant tell because the car put you in the overdrive gear already and you are only revving 1800 rpm. Electric cars are probably even worse in this regard because theres no sense of connection to the powerplant that you can interpret from the cockpit.
In a manual on the other hand, if you start having a lead foot, the engine lets you know. Once you are familiar with a given manual car's gear ratios, you don't need the dashboard anymore. You know what 3000 rpm feels like because (in a good drivers car at least) you can feel the engine vibrating through the pedals, through the steering wheel, and through the gear shift, in additon to hearing the exhaust note. You also quickly figure out what speed a given rpm gets you in each gear. Maybe 4th gear at about 2000rpm is your 35mph cruising gear. To go over the speed limit in this case you would have to rev the engine up which would be noticeable, or shift into 5th.
That still doesnt make you immune to theft. I had an older crappy car and it was constantly targeted for things like a $5 charging cable I got from the gas station with frayed wiring. It didn't matter if I had nothing in it, people will still rip through the glove box on the off chance I do. I feel like an older car is a mark in that sense because of how easy it is to get inside. With mine, you can activate the unlock button with a shoelace because it protrudes slightly, but the tools most thieves use these days (the air bag jack and the long rod inserted into the gap the air bag jack for hitting the unlock button) will work on all cars, and these tools are sold at hardware stores. After that 10 seconds it takes to get the car unlocked, there's no more risk of being caught stealing because then you look like you could very well be the car owner rooting around.
In the U.S. it doesn't matter what it is, people want it for the scrap value at the very least. Its like a bed frame's worth of scrap but you can ride it off versus having to schlep it.
