“Where did all the manuals go?” asks Jethro Bovingdon as he drags his poor, withered left leg behind him. Because the rise of the EV and the proliferation of the auto has seen manuals all but disappear from UK shores. America, on the other hand, is positively rolling in them. Weird.

So we grabbed two of the most-exciting manuals on sale in the US that we don’t get back in Blighty, and set about proving once and for all that manual beats auto. To do this we required several things: Jack in a competitive car with an auto-box (OK, we might have fiddled this bit), an empty race track, and some skids. Lots of skids.

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Chapters:
00:00 Intro
01:24 Manual vs Auto
02:29 Drag Race
04:04 Auto Hot Lap
05:20 BMW M3 Hot Lap
06:37 Cadillac Hot Lap
08:48 Auto Drifting
11:36 BMW M3 Drifting
13:48 Cadillac Drifting
16:28 Conclusion

MORE ABOUT TOP GEAR:
Welcome to the official home of Top Gear on YouTube. Here you'll find all the best clips from your favourite episodes, whether that’s Ken Block drifting London in the Hoonicorn, Chris Harris in the latest Porsche 911 GT3 or classic Top Gear clips from Clarkson, Hammond and May. You'll also find the latest performance car reviews from the TopGear.com crew, our brand new series American Tuned with Rob Dahm and the fastest power laps from our in house performance benchmark: The Stig.

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