As the dust and bent metal settled on my son’s Porsche crash, there was an obvious question: what happened? How had he managed to fire up a 500-horsepower car and launch it through our garage door like a four-wheeled missile?
When I decided to write about the incident for Globe Drive, the story quickly took on a life of its own. My son had created a real-life version of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. A $180,000 car was trashed. So was my garage. I was flooded with e-mails from around the world. Some readers blamed me for the crash, assuming that I had blithely handed my son the keys. (I didn’t, although there was a tongue-in-cheek headline in the print version of the story which gave the opposite impression.) Now I was searching for answers, sifting through the debris like an air crash investigator.
The accident had been a spectacular one. The car was a 2010 Porsche Turbo, one of the fastest-accelerating cars in the world. In a distance of just a few feet, it had gained enough kinetic energy to blow apart a 15-foot-wide garage door that had been reinforced with extra steel reinforcement ribs. The door tracks, rollers and support frame were trashed.
Some things were obvious. My son had gone to the garage to show a friend the car. I didn’t know he had taken the key. But what had happened after that? The only witnesses were my son and his friend. All they could tell me was that they had decided to get in the car, and put in the key so they could hear the stereo and watch the Porsche navigation screen come to life. I asked my son if he had pushed in the clutch. He didn’t know. “It just went,” he said.
I began piecing the disaster together. The Turbo was a six-speed manual. I had left it parked in first gear, which is standard practice in a manual car, because it prevents the car from rolling if the parking brake slips. The parking brake was also applied, but only a click or two – it was only a backup, in case the car got knocked out of gear. On a level surface (like my garage floor) even the lightest parking brake application would keep the car stationary. For someone trained on a standard transmission, this is all de rigueur.
The Porsche was equipped with a safety switch that prevented it from starting unless the clutch was depressed. So my son must have pushed down the clutch. I asked him if he had. He didn’t know. Now the pieces started falling into place. My son only knows how to drive an automatic, and is trained to press on the brake before turning the key. He had pressed on the left pedal, as always, but it wasn’t the brake – instead, it was the clutch. Although he didn’t realize it, he had just cocked a 500-hp. weapon. There were safety mechanisms, but he had slipped past them all without realizing it.
As I analyzed the crash, I realized that it was about more than mechanics. It was about a generational shift. I learned to drive a standard transmission in the 1960s, before I was old enough for a driver’s licence. Back then, mastering the clutch was both a rite of passage, and a point of pride. By the time I turned 16, I had mastered the finer points of manual shift-driving, including heel-and-toe technique, which allows you to blip the throttle while simultaneously working the clutch and brake.
But my son is part of a generation that has left the stick shift behind. In his wide group of friends, my son knows only one who can drive a manual transmission. The majority of cars sold today are automatics. When my son was 14, I took him out on a back road and showed him how to work the clutch and gearshift. The shift lever was like the door handle to the kingdom of high-performance driving, and I assumed that my son would be as awed by it as I had been back in the 1960s, when my father solemnly instructed me about its function – as I moved the lever, I envisioned the gears spinning on their shafts inside the transmission, a humming mechanical cosmos that was now at my command. But my son’s eyes glazed over – unlike me, he had no interest in the workings of a car.
