Idling in gear

Most of my experience with cars is with automatics: every rental car I drove in the US, as well as some of my own cars like the police car. Still, I have now driven enough manuals that I am wondering about an apparent pattern. My impression of older cars is that if one were to leave the pedals alone in first gear then the car might jerk forward somewhat but would soon stall. However, with cars from the past decade or so, it seems like they are more inclined to actually keep on moving forward, almost like an automatic. I wonder if this is a real change: if idle speed tends to be set higher, or if this is a feature of fuel injection, or what.

Driver console controls in cars

As a child I used to enjoy playing a helicopter simulation game. There were many buttons required to control it: the joystick pitched and rolled, one yawed by adjusting the tail rotor speed, or rose or fell (or, god forbid, autorotated) by adjusting the main rotor pitch, all separately from adjusting the engine power. Then there were the navigation controls, weapon selection and targeting, defensive countermeasures, etc. I think that the richness of the control made the game more agreeably immersive.

I had a strange sense driving home today that I was missing buttons. I have a number of odd momentary feelings in my life, as if things are old habits to me that actually aren't, and this one took the form of expecting buttons and flip-switches, more of them at chest height and even above. I think I'm not a big fan of having to look down far from the windshield to twist and push the right bits of knobs and levers at the ends of sticks.

I thought fondly of our old Geo Metro that we bought from a Brazilian entomologist. Around the outside of the plastic canopy wherein nestle one's speedometer and gauges it had a number of large push buttons protruding outward, for lights and whatnot. I much preferred this and wish the design had caught on. It took but a quick glance from the road to see the current state and how to adjust it.