Noble Dashes My Dreams
I thought the last bastion of hope for the manual supercar were the British built cars. It was a sense of honor and pride. A sense of history and doing things properly. And it turned out to be just my imagination. Noble, British automaker of the M600, announced they would be introducing a paddle shift option for its M600, and an open top.
Details are scarce about how the changes will be executed but the company really needs to expand its business and the only way of doing that is expanding the options it has on its sole car. For me this is awful news.
Not that it actually affects me. I most likely will never get my hands on a Noble, but just the thought that there were a group of people in a shed somewhere in the UK working on a supercar that only had a manual transmission was an amazing thought.
I don’t want the manual to die, sure the paddles are faster by two tenths of a billionth of a second, but does that really matter? No, it doesn’t. Unless you are the most brilliant of racing drivers, in an actual race, a paddle shift gearbox doesn’t make a lick of sense. You with your hands of flubber, and your feet of lead can’t extract that last tenth that the gearbox can do.
This turned into a bit of a soapbox speech hasn’t it? Oh well. We need to save the manual transmission for supercars! Pricing or a timeline on the Noble “upgrades” haven’t been announced, and it also hasn’t been announced if whether or not these changes will finally allow the Noble into the U.S.