I guess what I was thinking when I wrote the original post wasn't necessarily about driving, although my post implied that.

Involvement, as marketing professionals know all too well, is a very tricky thing. People have so many things in their lives tugging at them from so many directions, that most of them welcome a little relief, in the form of a mechanical device (automatic shift) to remove some of that day-to-day complexity. A car is complicated, people just want it 'to work'. Hence the intense scrutiny on Consumer Report's 'Service History' of cars. Politics is complicated, so we get a low-level of involvement. For some people, the stock market is difficult, so now we have people called 'fund managers', and laws such as 401(k). Some people (present company excluded) find personal computer difficult and while they want to hand over some tasks to the machine, they experience trepidation in doing so, because they just don't understand how it's actually doing it's function.

I feel that the shift (pun intended) to automatic transmissions is just a part of this thread of complexity running through the average person's daily life.

Remember IBM's theme of years ago? "Machines should work, people should think."

I guess I've used up my 2 cents, please forgive the rambling.