I'm getting absolutely slaughtered on Facebook for this, so it's nice to have the attention diverted to something else. I hadn't actually ever seen a manual-transmission car in North America before, although they were available - I had always just assumed that we would get an automatic.

I might look into actually using the paddle gears sooner than I thought, though, just because the default for the computer seems to be staying in first gear a little longer than I think necessary, expecting you to accelerate more. This is all really strange - I've never owned a car put together after 1995 before.