Few drivers in the US want a standard shift automobile, and the numbers are dwindling further lately. The Porsche Tiptronic S can be switched from manual shift to automatic. This type of car is likely to become the norm in the future.

The most primal part of the art of driving is what you hold in the palm of your hand: the stick. It’s no accident that hardcore auto enthusiasts are called gearheads. The shift gate is the way to a car’s soul; the stick throbs with the heartbeat of the engine. Forget its energy savings, forget the inevitable Freudianisms: In a fine gearbox, there is nothing less than music. You drive by ear as much as by hand.

I have heat-hazed memories of my first stick–a landlord-green Plymouth Belvedere with three on the tree in which, one summer, I stuttered and stalled across the Carolina Piedmont. The stick is human because it’s harder. It keeps reminding you of your fallibility; many a Nascar driver has lost a race when he missed a shift.

But hold on to your knob, because transmissions are about to change radically. With urban traffic at a crawl, the U. S. market for sticks, always small, has continued to shrink. It’s no fun to pump a clutch through a two-mile-long, two-mile-per-hour backup on the Gowanus Expressway. And soon you won’t have to choose between the craft of a manual and the ease of an automatic.

An early bid comes from Porsche: the Tiptronic S, which can shift between manual and auto. In manual mode, you shift by means of buttons on the steering wheel, just as in Formula One race cars. The Tiptronic would face more resistance among gearheads had it not come from engineers with the credentials of Porsche’s The 911 already offers a four-speed Tip, but the new five-speed version in the Boxster and in the forthcoming new 911 is a much-improved animal. Now Audi, too, whose new models reflect increasingly clever design and engineering, has licensed Tiptronic as the automatic option in the ‘98 A4 and in the new, larger A6, out next month.

The Tip’s chip reads a number of factors–throttle pressure, braking, and grade foremost among them–to adapt its shift points, reading the driver almost the way the driver used to read the road. It’s even integrated with traction control, responding to any spin or slip.

I tested the Tip against the stick in Boxsters on the autobahn, where race -car style buttons feel right at home. It’s easy to get used to thumbing and forefingering up and down through the gears–and you have push-button passing power at your fingertips. It’s at low speeds that the Tip feels odd: Working it through villages that rise up as suddenly as Brigadoon or around farm equipment that pops up on the blind curve of a narrow lane, you miss the clutch and stick when you’re trying to get back up to speed. Your right hand feels underemployed, twitching like a new ax-smoker’s, while your clutch foot dances reflexively on the ghost pedal.

But the Tip is well suited to the American exurbs; running it around a Northeast metropolis, I relished having a hand free to communicate forcefully with other drivers. Less satisfying is another auto/manual hybrid: Chrysler’s AutoStick. Like the Tip, it slots easily from auto to manual. But you still shift on the floor, up and down, and the motion felt uncertain and plastic in the Intrepid I drove. After a while, the manual option seemed a nuisance: The engine is powerful enough, and the automatic responsive enough, that manual hardly seems worth the trouble.

It’s with smaller engines that the stick has always been most appreciated. And only smaller engines, up to now, have been able to accommodate the technology that represents the true future of transmissions. Continuously variable transmissions, or CVTs, use belts instead of gears to transmit the power of the engine to the wheels. By cutting out the middleman of gearing, they can significantly reduce fuel consumption. They’ve been around for decades in Europe and Asia, but only recently has a successful CVT gone on the market here, in the Honda Civic coupe, in which it drives like an automatic with unearthly long first and second gears.

Now Ford is claiming a major breakthrough in using CVTs,with larger engines. Its engineers put an experimental CVT in a Taurus with a six-cylinder Vulcan. In demonstrations, it pulled strongly and steadily from a stop to sixty, with none of the wavering power of some earlier CVTs or the sometimes hiccupy shifts of the standard Ford automatic.

But CVTs can feel positively weird: They have no shift points; they’re as seamless as the clothes on Star Trek. Like compact discs, however, they are the way of the future–the simpler, smoother successor to the ragged grooves of gears. And, just as we miss the tone arm and needle, we’re going to miss the stick.

Five years ago, H. A. Humpy Wheeler, the marketing whiz behind the Charlotte Motor Speedway and the new Texas Motor Speedway, created the Legends cars, flashy five-eighths-scale replicas of late-1930s hot rods. Legends racing has taken off in the heartland, with country-music stars and off-duty Nascar drivers piloting their own. Here’s Humpy’s latest notion: the Bandolero, half go-cart, half racer, a 450-pound vehicle with a screamin’ V-Twin Briggs & Stratton engine and a wacky, faux-Ferrari fiberglass body. Named after Pancho Villa’s insurgents, the Bandolero fits in a pickup-truck bed and sells for less than seven grand. Wheeler envisions a whole racing circuit built around the car. For info on where to buy and race the Bandolero, contact 600 Racing: 704-455-3896.

Highway violence is rising, gas consumption is fast approaching pre-energy-crisis levels, and Barry White is back. The time is right for Interstate ‘76, an “auto-combat simulation” computer game compounded of muscle cars, heavy weaponry, a funk soundtrack, and dudes with huge Afros. The time is an alternative version of the 19705, the place a stylized version of the American Southwest that resembles the landscape of The Road Warrior You play an “auto vigilante,” roaring down the road in a 426-horsepower machine equipped with twin M-60S, determined to save America’s remaining petroleum reserves.

You can customize the cars–which have names like Piranha and Manta–by adding new tires, nitrous oxide, and more firepower. Interstate ‘76 puts racing games in the shade. It’s also a digital depiction of the daydreams of millions of us marooned on the interstate, itching to blow away the jerk in the Camaro who just cut us off. Interstate ‘76 comes on two discs, taking up a minimum of 80 megs on your hard drive, and requires a fast Pentium. It’s $49.95 from Activision.