Automatic V Manual Older possibly dyspraxic drivet

Has anyone switched from manual to automatic because of the mental workload?

Before anyone says it: I did search through previous posts, and I think I’ve probably already come to my own conclusion, but I’d really like to hear other people’s experiences.

I’ve been learning to drive for coming up to a year. It took me about two months just to get reasonably comfortable with clutch control. I’ve had two instructors — one who wasn’t particularly good, and my current instructor, who actually is very good.

The problem is that I still seem to struggle with the amount of information I’m trying to process at once. My instructor often tells me that I need to anticipate the road more, and I understand what he means, but from inside my head it feels less like I’m not thinking and more like I’m already thinking about six things at once.

For example, approaching a junction I’m trying to remember mirrors, signal, braking, positioning, changing gear, clutch control, finding the biting point, looking for traffic, judging when it’s safe to go, steering correctly, watching pedestrians/cyclists, etc.

I can operate the clutch and gears now. That isn’t really the issue. It just feels like gears and clutch control are another job competing for attention that I could otherwise be using to actually read the road.

It has also been suggested that I may be dyspraxic, which may or may not be relevant.

So for anyone who learned manual for a while and then switched to automatic: did you find that it genuinely freed up enough mental capacity to make the rest of driving easier? Or did you find that the difficult bits were still difficult regardless of the gearbox?