You say that as though there’s something wrong with that.
The one bad thing about the new car that I bought last year is that I had to give up my tape deck. Now I no longer have a place to play my Pet Shop Boys and Depeche Mode cassettes. 
There’s a difference between a non-lethal activity being made easier and a potentially lethal activity allegedly being made easier.
I think that driving a car requires a lot of attention, else someone could die, mainly me! A manual transmission provides me an additional way to keep that attention. Also, how could some car engineer know when I want to shift gears? He/She doesn’t!
And, twigstress, your tapes were going to destruct anyway (I know mine did). Make sure your car has an entertainment system with no moving parts (CD player, e.g) that will eventually break, and make sure it has a USB port, so you can plug in an iPod with your 500 favorite albums in an itty-bitty living space.
How do the songs get from the cassettes into something with a USB port?
For that matter, how do they get from CDs into something with a USB port?
New car does have a CD player. That was a requirement. Knocked out quite a few contenders too.
Special equipment. Most everybody had that equipment for the CDs for a while, till it became harder to find computers with CD drives…
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Yeah, new car doesn’t have manual transmission… it’s got that CVT. I don’t like an automatic transmission changing gears at times that it ascertains rather than me. Drove me nuts when I drove my mom’s or stepmom’s cars or rentals.
But the CVT is not so bad. I don’t mind it.
And my requirements were:
CD player
Heated & ventilated seats
4WD or AWD
Decent cargo space
Comfortable
Reliable
There was basically nothing that met all of those requirements and came in a manual option. So that requirement was dropped from the list. Heck I’ve probably given you enough to determine all but the color of the vehicle I ended up with.
haven’t really noticed inflation except for the price of gas. Have noticed some shrink-flation, which is kinda novel
Sounds like a lot more work than popping the CD into the CD player. 
Absolutely - but you should only have to do it once.
auto trans seem to always be in 3rd gear at 20 mph. In city traffic u need the most oomph at 20-30. That’s the only time i miss manual
I can’t resist the nostalgia. I’m so old that I can remember carrying trays of punch cards down a couple floors to the “machine room” containing an IBM 360, complete with many spinning tape drives. The tray contained both the code for the job I was running and the input data. I’d get the results (sometimes a couple hundred page partition dump) the next day. If lucky, in half a day.
One production job required that the cards be sorted. So I would use the card sorter in the machine room, one column at a time.
When the company transitioned off cards, I picked up a card filing cabinet - 12 drawers, each with two removable trays, army surplus green. Still makes an ideal garage storage unit.
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Why stop at the transmission? Why not get to manually do all sorts of things!?
Fun fact sperm whales have constant manual control over their breathing so they can drown if they’re not careful while sleeping.
Wow! That sounds awesome! 
I can’t say as I’ve ever actually done much with punchcards, but I’ve certainly heard stories about dropping them and having to get them back in order. Sounds very un-fun.
The BLS tries to adjust for many of the things on your list.
I think their method involves the fact that most of those things were options before they became standard equipment. So they could link to the optional equipment price.
Do they really? I recall learning in an economics class that they don’t.
Certainly not stuff like the tires lasting longer. I can see maybe stuff like the power windows because, as you say, there was a period where they were optional add-ons.
This looks like their method. They certainly try to catch everything material.
However, just like any other good, something that is brand new, like adaptive cruise control, give them problems.
Well, I also like to accelerate and brake (manually, with my feet) when I determine it necessary (or when I want to). I think those are also the driver’s responsibility. I was in a rental car whose cruise control had a slowing mechanism for whenever some other car was too close in front of ours. It would start slowing down while I was looking to pass, and I might have needed acceleration at that very moment. It truly sucked.
I hope you still roll down your window 
DTNF probably still has his Klondike horse, for that full control.
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The only way to truly feel the fluids pumping in your vehicle
- Dump the cassettes. The audio is gets shittier with each playing. If you have been keeping up with the times, you’d have all those cassettes as CDs.
- Here’s what I did: I took a CD I want on my iPod, put the CD into the CD reader of my home PC once (see, not every time I want to hear it), added it to iTunes (free, I ain’t buying what I already got), and then had it added to my iPod. Times 500. Well, a lot of the CDs were on a storage drive from my brother-in-law, who had a lot of albums (“a collection of songs,” not “LP record”) already on storage, and put many of those onto iTunes, which then loaded to my iPod. And now, I rarely listen to CDs anymore.