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Wed Jul 13, 2005 8:44 pm

Can anyone tell me pros and cons to autostick?and are they difficult or easy to maintain?

Thu Jul 14, 2005 4:13 am

I've always felt that they are the bastard child of the automotive world. I've owned 3 of them and that's enough. The engine has additional plumbing on it to help cool the ATF and it's driven off of the oil pump. So it's pulling power from the engine and creating more heat. Then there's the slippage that is present with any autotrans but the VW engine has so very little power to begin with that there is no reserve IMO. If you're very familiar with stock VWs, then you're aware of the old addage: "If you want to get somewhere on time, leave early." I've had many stock VWs with standard trannys that I had to downshift at each steep hill or get a run at them. Combine that lack of power with a power robbing autostick and you'll find yourself in a car that won't get anywhere anytime soon.

I've never known how these things work but you disengage the engine from the transmission by pushing down on the gearshift knob. I've always been in the habit of resting my right hand on the gearshift and when I drive the autostick, I'm constantly disengaging it. Then I realize what I'm doing and I take my hand off of it and it reengages, sometimes with fits and jerks. The darn thing is absolutely maddening.

I have to presume that between that silly electric clutch thing and the really noticable lack of power, most autosticks have rather low mileage on them because they're really no fun to drive. All of my autosticks had less than 40,000 when I bought them and I never kept them very long.

I've never had an autostick that had to have the tranny looked at by a mechanic. Again, I chalked that up to low mileage. But I've also noticed that virtually without exception, every autotrans mechanic I talked to politely asked me NOT to bring it to them if I did need work. It's not the same as a conventional PRNDL tranny.

One of my auto sticks was a Ghia and a buddy of mine and I installed a standard 4 speed. We just liked the Ghia so well that we felt it was worth it to do the change. It got pretty involved by the time we finished. We had to scrounge a lot of parts. One of the big challenges was that we ran a steel tube through the tunnel in the pan to house the clutch cable. Without this tube, the clutch cable would rub itself to failure on the pan at several different points. Replacing clutch cables is no fun either. But then, in order to get the steel tube in place, it had to have a slight curve to it all along the length of the tunnel. It took quite a bit of head scratching. We had to cut holes in the tunnel to tack weld the tube into place and then had to weld back the holes. In the end, it worked GREAT but it was a LOT of work.

At the risk of being really long winded, I have to say that a lot of autosticks have shown up among the trike builders around the country. www.btw-trikers.org is the official website for these guys. But it seems that the autostick has found a following among guys that are disabled but want to go riding with their motorcycle buddies. My wife is NOT disabled, but she is certainly interested in my building a trike for her and she's thinking that she'd like to have the autostick. The very light weight of a trike means that the autostick would be plenty zippy in that application.