I tend to get frustrated with automatics myself because to me they always seem to shift when they shouldn't. Once when I borrowed my mom's Audi I was going up a hill, caught up to the car ahead and eased off on the throttle. So the automatic shifted to a heavier gear. And now I couldn't keep pace, so stepped on the throttle. Which made it shift to a lower gear again, making me catch up too fast. Couldn't find the sweet spot and it just kept shifting up and down on me like that as I just tried to keep pace with the car ahead. Was nearly screaming with rage at the damn thing before I got to the top.

That's just one example and probably a bad one at that, I know driving an auto isn't normally like that. It is down to personal preference in most cases. I saw one reviewer on TV say once that if you enjoy driving and prefer to have a car that at all times does exactly what you want it to do, choose manual. If you view your car as just a tool that simply gets you from A to B, choose auto. That is over-simplifying it though.

It also comes down to what kind of roads you tend to be driving on and what you use your car for. Depending on where I work I can find myself driving on countryside twisting, hilly roads a lot. I may also be pulling hangers, fairly heavy ones sometimes. I personally feel that an automatic's shifting tend to be the opposite of what I want in conditions like that. It may not be so wrong in reality, but it does frustrate *me*, which is what matters. Also, I don't like not being in complete control of what the wheels are doing in the very slippery conditions we can sometimes have here. Yes, you have all these fancy anti-spins and stability controls now and I'm aware that overall these do a better job at controlling the car than I do. But it can in fact get so bad that even these systems won't work right, and being in control myself I can at least adapt to the changing conditions while the automatic systems are adjusted to work across an average which only covers ninety-some % of the possibilities.

But I don't think people are making the wrong choice when choosing an automatic and would never tell anyone so, it's all up to whatever you feel comfortable with in the end. And I am more comfortable with a manual. Simple as that, really.

And oh, congrats with the new car Demon! Looks really nice.