{"id":107,"date":"2026-08-10T01:44:00","date_gmt":"2026-08-10T00:44:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/whatsonmadeira.info\/automatic-or-manual-madeira\/"},"modified":"2026-08-10T01:44:00","modified_gmt":"2026-08-10T00:44:00","slug":"automatic-or-manual-madeira","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/whatsonmadeira.info\/en\/automatic-or-manual-madeira\/","title":{"rendered":"Automatic or manual"},"content":{"rendered":"<h2>Where the difference shows<\/h2>\n<p>On the Via R\u00e1pida along the south coast the gearbox is irrelevant. The difference appears on the old connections into the highlands and on the approaches to trailhead car parks: short, very steep sections, single lane, with hairpins where you have to stop and pull away again.<\/p>\n<p>Then there is oncoming traffic. On a single-lane mountain road an approaching vehicle means stopping on the slope, reversing, letting it past at a passing place, and pulling away on the slope again. That is the situation that decides it.<\/p>\n<h2>What that means in practice<\/h2>\n<p>If you drive a manual daily and know mountain roads, a manual is fine. If you rarely do either, budget the automatic surcharge \u2014 it is smaller than the price of a burnt clutch, and that gets charged on return.<\/p>\n<p>Whatever the gearbox: do not take the smallest model. Not for top speed, but because a car with a little more torque asks for far less clutch work on a slope.<\/p>\n<h2>And four-wheel drive?<\/h2>\n<p>No. The roads are surfaced, including the steep ones. What is missing is room, and sometimes grip in the wet \u2014 four-wheel drive solves neither. An ordinary compact with decent tyres covers everything open to the public.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The question is not settled on the expressway but on the eighteen per cent ramp up to a trailhead.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":89,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-107","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-practical-info"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/whatsonmadeira.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/107","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/whatsonmadeira.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/whatsonmadeira.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/whatsonmadeira.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=107"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/whatsonmadeira.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/107\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/whatsonmadeira.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/89"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/whatsonmadeira.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=107"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/whatsonmadeira.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=107"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/whatsonmadeira.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=107"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}