Best mileage: Automatic or manual?
Best Mileage: Automatic or Manual? When shopping for a vehicle that will return the best gas mileage, an old maxim was that a vehicle equipped with a manual transmission -- one with a clutch that must be shifted by the driver -- would be more economical than the same vehicle using an automatic transmission. Is that still true today? It was back when the average automatic transmission had only three gears and was a lot less efficient in transferring power to the rear wheels. But today's automatic transmissions sort through as many as eight forward speeds under all types of driving conditions to deliver optimum performance. And the new Continuously Variable Transmissions, or CVT, use a series of belts to...