I was quite a fan of the manual transmission, but I got an automatic car for the first time now (Mercedes A-class), and it's just so good at shifting that I never even consider it any more. I think of the transmission as another part of the driving experience to automate away now, like turning lights and parking brakes on and off.

There is difference with automatic gearbox (planetary gearbox) and DCT gearbox which is much closer to the manual IIRC.

Unfortunately you'll also be automating away an element of driving that many people consider fun.

It still has paddles, so you can manually shift. Sure, if you don't like it, it takes away the element of fun, but a few minutes of fun isn't worth the hours of manual-shifting drudgery during rush-hour traffic for me.

How would you automate turning lights?

They are pretty useless if they only fire when the car is already turning. The whole point of them is to give a warning prior to turning.

Sorry, it was "turning lights (on and off)", I meant the headlights.

It’s quite possible that’s true of many people.

But I like manual transmissions as they force me to pay attention to the act of driving quite frequently. Without that constant reminder, I have a tendency to zone out and go on autopilot myself, which is of course dangerous.

Manual transmissions are my hack to attack this issue - but I’d love to have a self driving car where I was reasonably confident that my zoning out would not be a safety hazard. (As a manual transmission isn’t a great hack, and I live in an urban area, I mainly take the bus, which solves the "zoned out problem" completely.)

I suspect that "zoning out" will be a big question as these technologies are brought to market albeit in a different way than you describe. Many of the things being worked on will likely be useful and potentially available as assistive systems well before they could be delivered as part of a complete autonomous system. However, there will almost certainly come a point when you can provide too much of certain kinds of assistance unless you're prepared to actually turn over full control to the system.

You can't have a system that doesn't need a person to do anything 99% of the time but requires that same person to take over control at a moment's notice to deal with some situation that the computer doesn't know how to handle or, indeed, didn't even recognize.