Some time ago I mentioned a trip to Italy, in which I drove around with my wife in a Smart Car. Here's a picture I took at lunch one day; while the car might cause drooling among teenagers, it was a bit over-styled for our tastes. I would have preferred the little two-door job, though we probably wouldn't have been able to fit our suitcases in it.

The Smart Car was fine and trouble-free, for the most part, except for this:

This is the best picture I could find of the gear shift knob, but it's not quite the same as the one I saw; replace the "N" with an "A", and add some other arbitrary letter to the left hand side of the diagram, and you get the picture. Oh, and no clutch. The rental car person had asked me whether I knew how to drive a manual transmission, and I'd said, "Of course." This was a bit different, though. In case it isn't obvious (as it wasn't to me at first), this shifter is hooked up to an electronic gear box. It has a neutral position in the middle left, and to shift to a higher gear you push forward, and to a lower gear you pull backward. After each shift you let the shifter return to its neutral position in the middle. A little electronic display on the dashboard tells you which gear you're in, if you can't tell from the engine noise, and the car shifts to lower gears automatically as your speed drops.

So far, so good (even slick), except that the car sometimes refused to go into first from neutral. (Imagine being stuck in the middle of a busy Milan intersection, unable to move. If your imagination includes being gestured at and cursed in Italian, you have the right picture in mind.) I had to turn the car off and restart to get it to work. Okay, once I figured that out, things went more smoothly.

But not quite. After twenty years or so of driving, I have habits that turn out to be deeply ingrained. For example, when I drive my own car, I start in first gear, with the shifter in the forward position, and when the engine starts revving too high, I shift into second by pulling the shifter hard back toward me. Ditto for third gear to fourth. Wrong instinct. In the Smart Car, it turned out that sometimes my hand wanted to shift to a higher gear by yanking backward on the shifter (while my foot wanted to stomp on the nonexistent clutch pedal on the floor). Not good: the result was to shift the car into a lower gear, causing some consternation to my brain once it realized what my hand and foot had been up to.

It's little things like this that make me realize how difficult it is for people to change their ways.