I am returning to driving so I chose to go to CDL school at Northwestern Technical College in Rock Spring, GA. Very good school training in my opinion which cost around $2600.00 but HOPE Grant paid it for me. At least most of it. We had one automatic on the yard. Did not test out in it because we could not get our CDL license driving it per our instructor. We did drive it on the yard. Trucks were rotated by teams. I got to drive my first Peterbilt ever, very nice and powerful but huge nose and turning radius. Loved shifting that truck! From what I was told and what little I experienced, I would rather drive a GOOD manual shift truck. Any truck that is worn out like some we had would be no good to drive either way. If truck conditions were equal, I will take the manual shift. First time I drove the automatic, it actually scared me when it would shift at times, because it was the wrong time for a shift. We were just doing maneuvers on the yard, 90degree backing, parallel backing, offset backing, etc. Also the automatic sometimes would take forever to go from D to R or vice versa. That was really annoying to me. And the thing that got me was: when you start you have to use the clutch, and when you stop you have to use the clutch. So what is the big help? In traffic, wouldn't you be using the clutch just the same as a manual shift?
I heard that some companies would not hire you from a company like USxpress because they use automatics. One of our recruiters, forgot who, said they had tried auto but were going back to manual because the auto did not get the MPG that they thought it would AND they had a lot of clutch troubles in the AUTOs! I also heard that sometimes drivers reported that the AUTOs would lock up and you had to pull over, cut them off, let them reset and start over again. Would going up or down steep grades be good with this ??? JustMy2c
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