For more than 50,000 miles over the span of a few years, my 2003 Toyota Matrix was a loyal companion. It capably carried myself, my girlfriend, and a hatch full of our belongings across the continent to our new home in California. And like the vast majority of Matrices, my car featured the base 1.8L engine and a four-speed automatic gearbox.
Shortly after arriving in the Bay Area, my wandering eye locked onto an interesting prospect. San Francisco Toyota had a Matrix nearly identical to mine, although this one was equipped with a five-speed manual transmission. Instantly, they had my undivided attention: Rowing my own gears was one of my lifelong dreams.
Mom’s cars; all capable of seating our family of six and all with automatic transmissions.
Growing up, our family haulers (i.e. Mom’s cars) were always automatics. Dad’s economical commuters were manuals. By the time I began driving, his ’83 Sentra wagon—with a five-speed stick, naturally—was on its last legs. His next car, a ’90 Legacy, sported Subaru’s self-shifting 4EAT. Excepting some domestics that passed through Dad’s revolving-door fleet in his early adulthood, the Legacy was his first shiftless car. That he finally bought an automatic owed more to the general scarcity of manuals than any change in his preferences.
Dad’s cars; all equipped with manual transmissions.
At the time, he still had his summer car, an ’86 Nissan 200SX, with its manual five-speed. But he babied that car and wouldn’t dream of exposing the transmission and clutch to an inept teenager’s clumsy fumblings.
So as a result of some unfortunate coincidences, I never officially learned how to operate a manual transmission. But being the car-obsessed child I was, I knew from intent observation what you were supposed to do, of course. And somehow, I did drive the 200SX a mile down the road—once or twice. I can’t remember the details now, but it must have been a clandestine affair while my dad was away. Regardless, I managed to take off, navigate a suburban neighborhood, and return his car to its place without anyone noticing.
Within days of seeing the listing, I made an appointment to look at this manual Matrix. At San Francisco Toyota’s showroom on Van Ness, a close look at the car revealed numerous improvements over my 2003. Both cars were silver, but Toyota retired the slightly tinted Lunar Mist Metallic color for the purer Silver Streak Mica. Up front, Toyota stylists revised the Matrix’s aggressive ground effects—which perpetually scraped on driveway aprons and curbs.
2003 Matrix fascia (left) vs. 2006 (right) (2003 image credit: MD Laughlin).
Inside, a Toyota-branded Fujitsu Ten stereo—looking much more cohesive with the dash design—replaced the previous Delco unit. Responding to criticism of the all-red gauges on 2003 Matrices, Toyota redesigned the gauge faces with white numerals. In addition to being easier to read, the two-color Optitron gauges looked quite striking.
2003 Matrix gauges (left) vs. 2006 (right).
More relevantly, the prospective Matrix had ABS, an essential feature that my existing car lacked.
Though this 2006 car had nearly the same mileage as my 2003, it looked sharper and felt tighter in every conceivable way. I was already predisposed toward buying the car before I arrived, and everything I saw convinced me even further. After negotiating the relative values of the two Matrices, the salesperson and I arrived at a deal. The 2006 Matrix was mine. Now came the interesting part: getting it home.
Because of a number of factors—familiarity with the model, insecurity in my manual-shift competency, and the tight urban environment of the dealership—I never test-drove the 2006 Matrix before agreeing to buy it. (Yes, I realize how foolish that was.) My first time driving the car was out of the dealership’s garage. I squeezed between two other parked cars, around a concrete pillar, and out of the narrow garage. Then, I made a right turn onto the steepest stretch of Sacramento Street in the city. With knuckles whitened and heart pounding, I made my way up to Lombard and then across the Golden Gate Bridge to our home in Marin County. I could smell some traces of burning clutch, but I had kept my dignity from going up in flames.
San Francisco Toyota; I emerged from the side door (where the white 4Runner was pulling out) and made a right onto Sacramento Street.
Immediately, driving was no longer merely a mundane task; it became a challenge to be mastered. I eagerly seized any opportunity to get in the car and practice. That first weekend with the new Matrix, my girlfriend and I took off for Oregon. Somewhere on I-5 between Weed and Yreka, I started to relax a bit. This was becoming fun, I thought. The coordination of my left foot on the clutch and right hand on the shifter was automotive ballet. The sound of the engine, when I hit each gear perfectly, was nearly symphonic. Never before had the act of driving a car felt as rewarding.
2006 Matrix interior; it corrected the few deficiencies of the original.
A few months later, my girlfriend and I married, completing a life transformation that had begun a year earlier. We were newlyweds in a new state driving a new car, soon embarking on new careers. As we explored California—Bodega Bay to Barstow, Sacramento to Santa Monica—the Matrix was always with us. It proved as bulletproof as the automatic Matrix but was engaging to drive in a way its predecessor never was.
But in 2015, our carefree life in California faced an existential threat: pregnancy. My wife and I lived in a neat mid-century cottage in Corte Madera, but our living arrangement wouldn’t scale to suit a trio. Moreover, all of our family was east of the Rockies, and the complexities of cross-country travel with a newborn were more than we wanted to face. Ultimately, we decided to move back East.
As before, a flexible cargo area for that cross-country move.
And the Matrix faced threats on two fronts. First and foremost, my wife couldn’t drive it. She never was much for driving and couldn’t understand why anyone would want to shift gears for themself. When I first bought the car, I took her to an empty parking lot just to get the feel of the clutch and practice setting the car in motion. After stalling the car a couple of times, she refused to try it ever again. With a baby on the way, we didn’t want to risk her possibly being stranded at home. And by 2015, a host of new safety technologies had become commonplace. The Matrix lacked anything like forward collision warning, blind spot monitoring, cross-traffic alert…even a rearview camera.
I knew we had to get a car we both could drive. Party time was over—but it was fun while it lasted.
Having nearly 230K on the odometer (about 80K of which I was responsible for), the Matrix’s trade-in value was almost nil. That said, the car had been meticulously maintained and carefully driven, and it looked immaculate inside and out. We listed the car on Craigslist and were soon contacted by a Honduran man interested in the car. He said that in his home country, Corollas with manual transmissions were the vehicles of choice. But good, late model examples were getting harder to find. Being a mechanical cousin of the Corolla, my Matrix was attractive to him. The Honduran bought the car without much deliberation and planned to transport it back to Honduras.
In all likelihood, it’s still on the road.
Loaded onto the buyer’s trailer; saying goodbye with my wife (here, 8 months pregnant).
The Matrix was a car I always admired for its practicality and reliability, and my older brother urged me to buy one when I was new-car shopping in late 2006 to replace my ancient ’89 Mercury Tracer. At the time though, I was seduced by the great looks of the Scion tC which was far roomier inside and more practical than its sleek shape suggested, and that was the car that swayed me when I stepped into the Toyota showroom. The tC looked like a far more expensive car than it was, and assumedly would have the usual Toyota reliability. But at the last moment I test drove a ’07 VW Rabbit and was stunned at how luxurious and Audi-like it drove – it felt like a luxury car compared to anything else in its price range – and bought that instead. It was the big things like super-comfortable seats, and little things like the glovebox that was lined with padded felt and whose door was damped and opened slowly rather than crashing down. It offered much of the Matrix’s practicality with its five doors and boxy shape, right down to the front passenger seatback that folded down. I’m not sure why I didn’t consider buying a Matrix as it should have appealed to my appreciation for practicality. Somehow I just couldn’t get as comfortable in it as in the Rabbit. Also, what was up with not carpeting the cargo area?
I really like red interior illumination, but seem to be in the minority. I went with a friend shopping for an Audi A6 in 2000 which had all-red gauge lighting for the first 2-1/2 years of that generation, but abruptly partway through the model year switched to white gauge lighting with red for other displays and controls, along with replacing the analog clock with a digital display. Both changes were downgrades for me. One thing I liked about the Rabbit was its mostly red interior illumination, with deep blue on the gauges and the radio’s LCD display. There were even two red LED floodlamps in the overhead console shining down on my right hand working the manual shifter. The ’19 Golf that replaced it has all-white dash illumination and it’s less attractive and more glaring. Some new cars allow the driver to choose the illumination color, a great feature made possible by color-changing LEDs.
The Matrix wasn’t just a “mechanical cousin of the Corolla”, but actually was a Corolla – it was officially called a Corolla Matrix at least initially, with sales not broken out from other Corollas, although it wasn’t marketed as such.
A friend bought a used Pontiac Vibe about ten years ago which of course was the same car but with different sheetmetal also used for the JDM Toyota Voltz. His rationale for buying that car was simple and concise: “Toyota reliability, Pontiac depreciation”. The girl I was dating at the time found the name “Vibe” hilarious, and thought likewise about “Rabbit” for that matter. One track mind…
Every car I’ve owned since 1989 has had a stick shift, and the fine art of smooth manual-transmission gear changes I’ve honed for the last 3-1/2 decades will be what I miss most when electric cars take over. That aside I’ll happily let the ICE age slip into the past.
Brian, wonderfully told story, and much less painful than I had expected from last week. I am still amazed at your willingness to buy a manual shift car and to drive it home from the dealer to learn.
Your description of how it felt/feels to drive a manual versus an automatic pretty much sums up my feelings as well. To me, driving an automatic is like riding ON the car, driving a manual is being part of the car. I suppose that there’s a time and a place for either, but when it comes to day to day driving, I’d rather feel part of the vehicle.
That’s one place where our feelings about cars may differ. Now, I’m not one of those folks who will go on railing about “nanny systems”…and I think that ABS, traction control systems, and airbags are all positives so far as automotive technologies. But I’m also perfectly happy to drive without any of the particular safety technologies you name. MAYBE collision warning like Subaru has (available) where the car will actually brake to avoid a certain collision would be valuable…but things that just flash and beep at you without actually taking action, I can do without. And I generally disable them when I encounter a rental that has them. Just preference I suppose.
The Matrix sounds very much like a car that I’d enjoy, at least how you picture and describe it. That flat interior looks even more inviting than last week. The revised grill and gauges are also positives in my book. And yeah, I’d be most certain that car is still on the road in Central America and will be for some time.
One last question…you didn’t replace the clutch? I would doubt that it was replaced before you became 2nd owner. If that’s true, 230,000 on the original clutch in the Bay area…yet another testimony to Toyota durability!
Thanks for the kind words!
For the purposes of brevity and the overall story arc, I glossed over quite a few details. In reality, my learning process was a lot longer and more painful than the essay suggested. Yes, it was on that early trip to Oregon where I finally started to feel some confidence (and enjoyment), although mastering the manual was a “two steps forward, one step back” kind of growth. I still had some scary moments, especially during uphill starts in San Francisco.
Needless to say, I had worn out that original clutch within the first year of ownership and had to get it replaced. Fortunately, Kenzo, my local independent Toyota specialist in San Rafael, did excellent (and affordable) work.
Within two years, I’d say, I became fully competent with the manual. For what it’s worth: In 2014, I drove a diesel Fiat 500L with a six-speed manual across Europe. Even though the car was RHD and I had to adjust to the awkward combination of sitting on the right side and shifting with my left hand, my wife and I got through the trip with no drama.
As to the safety technology, I’m with you in a sense. I’ll be the first person to posit that the most effective safety device is a safe driver. But I will say that becoming a parent evolved my outlook somewhat. In addition to knowing that I wouldn’t be the only driver of our next car, I also worried a bit more about the unpredictable behaviors of (what I perceive to be) a less skilled, less attentive, and more distracted populace of drivers. And I couldn’t shake a nagging thought: What if I got involved in a serious, disfiguring accident, and it turned out that safety tech like autonomous emergency braking could have made a meaningful difference in the outcome? So in the Matrix’s replacement (a Volkswagen Golf SportWagen), I went all-in on safety tech. You can read all about that experience next week.
Certainly I agree about the joy of driving a manual and have always tried to have one as an everyday driver. A 2012 Ford Focus worked for several years; it had only five gears and really needed a sixth for high speed highway work in the west.
Like many others, I would prefer a wagon. The Corolla can be bought as a wagon in Europe – but of course not here. A hatch, like the Focus, can be made to work for me. Often I carry a bicycle in the back and sometimes a lot of stuff on winter migration to Arizona. In 2019 I bought a new Corolla Hatchback SE with a fine six speed manual. It was all Toyota goodness through and through and that transmission is a pleasure. The cabin is too short; I want that wagon still. That car was replaced with an identical 2021 model as a result of body damage from hitting an animal at 80 mph. The 2nd Corolla is also performs perfectly.
Sadly, as of 2023, the Corolla Hatchback is only available with a CVT (unacceptable). I’m planning to keep my ’21 six speed ICE car as long as I can into the supposedly coming electric age. I just wish it could have been a wagon but I can and will remove the bike’s front wheel for transporting in the car. The long, flat floor in that Matrix looks ideal; I did not really know about the car.
I’m just another American complaining “why can’t we have this?” I didn’t know how good the Matrix was until it was too late.
Brian, your story parallels mine (and I suspect that of many of our readers). I came of age at the time my parents had some stick shift cars, so I was able to learn to drive on a manual transmission. For decades I was a card-carrying manual transmission driver, and swore I would never own a car with an automatic.
You describe the experience well – I liken it to dancing with your car.Once you’ve experienced driving a manual transmission, it is hard to go back. Do you ever mash the brake pedal coming to a stop looking for a non-existent clutch pedal?
Once I got married, the hassles of having a car my wife couldn’t drive just became overwhelming, so I eventually gave in and started buying cars with automatics.
I still enjoy the opportunity to shift my own gears, but they are few and far between now. Other than the TT roadster that I owned for the summer of 2016, and a stick shift Chevy Cruze that my older son briefly owned, it has been all automatics all the time,
At least you picked a good one – Toyotas (and Hondas) have very forgiving manual transmissions and are easy to learn on. Volkswagens and Audis, with their high off the carpet clutch engagement points, are a little trickier to master.
My ’07 Volkswagen Rabbit with a 5 speed manual was super easy to drive with a clutch that gradually engaged about halfway through the pedal’s travel, mated to the 2.5L five-cylinder with gobs of low-RPM torque that was very forgiving if you were sloppy with your clutch work. My current ’19 Golf though has the tricky and uncomfortable “high off the carpet” clutch engagement point you describe, with the engagement seemingly occurring over only the last inch of pedal travel rather than through two or three inches as in the older car. The small 1.4T four-banger lugs at low RPMs too, often unexpectedly requiring downshifts to get the motor in its power band. The shifter itself isn’t quite as slick either. In all, working the gears in the newer car feels less sporty and more like a hassle. The only improvement is that the transmission finally got the 6th gear it should have had 15 years earlier.
Do I ever mash the brake pedal coming to a stop looking for a non-existent clutch pedal?
—Yes, as a matter of fact. Just writing this essay (and mentally reliving those days of driving the manual Matrix) caused me to do that in my automatic Golf last weekend. Over seven years later!
I’ve driven slushbox cars for the last 9 years. I don’t mash the brake pedal looking for a non-existent clutch pedal, but I do brake with my right foot most of the time. Exception: If I’m starting on a hill (the situation slushboxes were made for), I brake with my left foot and then ease up on the brake as I apply gas.
Looks as if one of your mom’s cars (the third one from the left) was a Renault Medallion. I’d like to know more about that.
Yes, indeed. My family owned not one but TWO Medallions, which much put us in some kind of “hundredth of one percent” category. The rarity of the cars and my connection to them might make them worthy of a COAL essay—if I had any pictures of them. Or anything really insightful to say.
Suffice it to say that having a family of six and a miniscule automotive budget, we went through a few odd vehicles. Even older minivans were still in high enough demand to be out of reach for us in the early ’90s. After a string of early ’80s GM bodies (including a diesel ’81 Custom Cruiser), we had a Dodge Colt Vista and the three-row Medallion wagon.
The Renault was an interesting vehicle with lots of French quirks. I wish I could go back in time and drive one new. Contemporary reviews for the new model were favorable with many praising the car’s driving dynamics. By the time we bought the car third-hand, it was getting rather shabby and had a number of niggling issues (flaky electrical connections, wiper arms coming loose). As with many cars of the era, the clear coat formulation wasn’t ready for prime time and gradually chipped away as time went on. Most problematic was a habitual overheating issue which was finally corrected when we located a used radiator. My memories of the car are dominated by recollections of driving around in July with the heater on full blast and all of the windows rolled down.
Strange,Im in my first deliberately chosen automatic car it has automation of almost everything in it but I also have a manual car without ower steer or ABS as I found on a wet road yesterday brakes are fine its traction that was missing yeah 1966 tech, love it.
I sure wish my ’03 Matrix had the more visible instruments, but I think I’ll leave it alone at this point. If you’re heading into the late afternoon sun, but the photocell for the lights is shaded by the windshield pillar, you can’t see the instruments at all. Oh well…
Thanks for sharing an enjoyable COAL series with us.
The Matrix is a cult classic in Canada. Toyota Canada even made them here after US production stopped. The buff books loved to hate the Matrix. They ranted about the archaic four speed automatic but you know what? That transmission is bulletproof and Matrix owners wouldn’t care anyway. They want a practical car that can swallow a lot gear. The streets of Vancouver are thick with them.
Kudos for learning to drive a manual transmission. I recently tried to teach my twenty-three year old son, who still doesn’t have a driver’s license. It was a complete failure and the prodigious torque my car makes scared him off.
He practiced driving with his girlfriend, took the test and promptly failed.
My 2006 was hands-down the most quirky little personality car I’ve ever driven. It held a massive amount of stuff, was good on gas and was good for city driving. It even made a few longer drives and it was comfortable, even after I threw out my back.
I didn’t get a chance to try a manual Matrix but if I see one…what would it hurt?
I traded the Matrix in last year on a used RAV 4, knowing some heavy road trips were coming. The car didn’t sit on the dealer’s lot a day. Someone came by and scooped unit up, likely complete with an oil leak and dirty interior.
The OP may have dodged a bullet when he sold his beloved Matrix while it was still in good working order. IIRC, there was some sort of weak-link engineering defect with the 5-speed and they were known for grenading after a certain number of miles.
There was no such malady with the 6-speed found in the upper-trim XRS version, and the automatics seem to hold up, as well.
This has to be one of the only times a manufacturer has lowered the top speed on a speedometer during a refresh! I tend to prefer red gauge illumination, and remember the red backlit instrument cluster in my 1995 Firebird to be easily readable at night (save for the rolling drum odometer, which you almost needed to turn a map light on to see the numbers). My bland white gauges in my friend’s 1996 Camaro felt much cheaper.
I learned to drive in a 1979 Chevy LUV with a four speed, and took my driving test in it as well, so I never really had a chance for fear to build up and make the process more difficult. It was probably one of the best vehicles to learn in, as the throttle and clutch take-up were very linear, the shift throws were fairly long and gears just clicked into place. It was much more forgiving than some of the other manual transmission vehicles I drove later, but the prior experience helped me to approach them without too much worry.
Good eye—although what you’re seeing in the instrument cluster photos above isn’t completely accurate. I didn’t have a good, clear photo of my 2003 Matrix’s gauges, so I Photoshopped elements together from a few different images. And the speedometer shown in the 2003 cluster is from an XRS model—which had a 9K tachometer and a 140 MPH speedometer.
I knew about the difference in tachometers between the two models but had forgotten about the different speedometers.
A true XR cluster from 2003 would look like the image below
Very enjoyable story. In about 2000, when I was living in North Carolina, a friend of mine took a similar path – he bought an Acura Integra stick-shift even though he didn’t know how to drive a manual. He bought it new, and had another friend of his drive him home from the dealership, since he couldn’t yet drive his own car.
Over the following weekend, I taught my friend how to drive a manual. He picked it up pretty quickly and after a few weeks, drove it very well. I think he figured “it’s now or never” as far as learning to drive a stick. Good move on his part – and a gutsy one too.
Just a few months ago, I taught one of my daughters to drive a stick (on her grandmother’s Jeep Wrangler). The process brought back lots of memories of both when I learned as a teenager, and then when I taught my buddy in North Carolina.
From the mid 1990s to the mid aughts my [then] wife and I owned three manual shift cars. All were 5 speeds, thankfully with the same pattern. The RLPlaut Coal series had manuals sprinkled amongst the early fleet but as a driver into and around the NYC metro area, manuals could be tiresome.
Bemoaning the dearth of new cars with manuals is a common occurrence on the internet and I still have one of those 5 speed manuals from the marital abode, but it will be the last one. Meanwhile I still take pride in executing smooth clutching and good shifting techniques … not always successfully.
As we were first musically told in 1968 while driving a three speed (on the tree) F-85 from Gilco Beach with a surfboard on the roof:
“You can’t always get what you want, But if you try sometime, you’ll find
You get what you need… “.
I’m open to an EV with one speed. After all, I cut my teeth on a 1950 Buick’s DynaFlow. The EV may even handle better and be a bit quicker.
Maybe.
I feel your loss, my wife sort of learned to drive manual but when back problems pushed her out of our Ranger (automatic) I had to trade in my Jetta for something with automatic and air conditioning. Since then all of the 4 wheeled vehicles are automatic but my gearhead son drives a 2000 Corolla 5 speed so the flame still burns.
I’ve admired these more than other Toyotas (well, going way back, I liked the ’77 Liftback I drove briefly for Hertz) as I’m a confirmed hatchback buyer (not owned a wagon, but to me that’s a bit of a technicality as hatchbacks and wagons are similar save maybe for cargo capacity)…but never owned one. Part of the deal for me is I hold onto cars a long time and many manufacturers briefly come out with a car I’d buy, but the timing isn’t right, and by the time I’m in buy mode they’re no longer offered (new, anyhow). That would be the case for the Matrix, as it came out in 2003 and I’d just bought my current 2000 Golf right before.
I did get to drive one briefly, during my Grandmother’s funeral, my youngest sister (who herself was to pass away only 4 years later) rented a Matrix, and knowing I liked hatchbacks offered to let me drive it (and I neglected my own rental). It was nice, probably more practical than the Golf, bigger cargo but more plastic rather than carpeted loading area, the Golf seemed a bit more plush…but that’s picking nits, at this point I’d consider any hatchback. The Golf is no longer sold in the US, I’m too old for a GTi (had an ’86) and sadly need to go for an automatic after 42 years of manuals (except for brief intervals when I’ve yet to sell prior car I only own 1 car at a time). No one in my family can drive my car, which can be an issue as you get older or have physical (even temporarily) restrictions.
Except for Toyota, and probably age, my family seems similar to yours in terms of cars, at least early on. My Dad’s first car was a ’56 Plymouth Plaza with no options, 3 speed manual, he bought it before he met my Mother, who has never been comfortable with manual, so starting in ’61 (Rambler Classic wagon) the primary family car had an automatic. My sister’s have never taken to manual either, one did own a Toyota briefly, but between my 2 youngest ones they’ve owned qty-4 200 or 240 SX Nissans between them (surviving sister still has her ’97 bought new). I had a Datsun 710 way back in the day; we seem to lean to Nissan for some reason. My Dad started owning a 2nd car in ’66 when he bought a ’59 Beetle, all of them were manual up to ’86 when he went back to buying American make automatics. His next car after the Beetle got totalled was a new ’68 Renault R10, he owned a new ’76 Subaru DL (FWD, they mostly still had FWD back in the 70’s) but each was a one off purchase not repeated.
For some reason I almost didn’t test drive my current car…having owned previous model and knowing I wanted the successor, I bought the car before someone at the dealership insisted I drive it before taking possession. I was an out-of-town buyer (dealers in my city I found lacking) and I found a couple defects I wanted fixed (rear door lock, plus disable the auto locking which I suppose I could have done myself but didn’t yet own the scan tool) and I’d driven my old car there (and I don’t do trade-in). They also insisted I get an add-on discount coupon book which I pointed out would be totally unusable by me as I almost never otherwise travelled to that other city, and it was for discounts only there, somehow I got them to rescind the $500 cost (they still gave it to me, guess I used it as scrap paper). I didn’t want the package that bundled a sunroof with alloy wheels but caved as it seemed almost all the cars I looked at had it, but for me wasn’t a deal killer.