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It happened again. Exactly as it has happened before.

Three teenagers tried to carjack a fancy foreign convertible in the Maryland suburbs. After demanding the keys, and getting them, they piled in.

One teen took the wheel. And then…

He couldn’t figure out how to handle the manual gearshift.

Because it didn’t say Park-Reverse-Neutral-Drive-Low.

It was four on the floor. Which required stepping on the clutch. Which he had never done before.

So the carjackers ran off, and the car was never stolen. That was a triumph of sorts.

But the biggest noise was not the footsteps of the escaping kids. It was the chortles of seniors who read about the incident. For them, standard shift used to be standard.

Until the mid-1950s, most cars sold in America lacked automatic transmission. You started the engine by placing the gearshift in neutral. But to go anywhere, you needed to step down on the clutch, shift the gear lever, and then carefully coordinate your two feet and your right hand.

Back off the clutch with your left foot just-t-t-t a little bit…Give it just the properr-r-r amount of gas with the right foot… Adjust…Coordinate…

And once you were actually moving, get ready to stomp down with the left, shift to a higher gear with your right hand and repeat as necessary.

If all your limbs weren’t working in perfect harmony, you wouldn’t go. Or more likely, you would buck, shudder, lurch, perhaps stall. And then succeed. Barely.

If that sounds like too tricky a ballet for today’s young drivers, that’s exactly why the Maryland carjacking failed.

We can ascribe that happy-ish ending to poor driver’s education. Today’s driver ed classes don’t even mention standard transmissions. Why should they? More than 97% of cars sold in America in 2024 had “PRNDL” displayed somewhere prominent, according to industry publications.

So it remains for us fossils to recall the wonders of grinding gears — and the occasional harrowing moments that came along for the ride.

Picture your humble and obedient columnist as a 20-something (yes, I know, it’s hard). He was visiting friends in San Francisco. He had held a driver’s license for some six years. He had considerable experience with standard shift. He was piloting a standard-shift Chevy. He was sure he was up to any challenge.

But San Francisco doesn’t have hills. It has HILLS.

There you are at a red light on a 25-degree grade. The light changes to green. And you?

You roar the engine. You begin to slip backward.

You roar harder. You let the clutch out a little more than you ordinarily might. You slip backward some more.

Yikes!

Luckily, just before you smack into the car behind you, success!

Does that memory linger? You’ve just gotten my answer to that question.

And what about the time you were confronted with a snowstorm in Chicago? The white stuff was halfway up the hubcaps. But never fear. Our hero would get his car full of college students safely back to the dormitory.

He almost didn’t.

Light turns green. Snow is blowing and drifting. Back off the clutch. Give it some gas.

But then, the car begins to slide sideways.

Whoops! Back off the gas. Step on the clutch.

No! That disengages the gears! Makes the sliding worse, not better!

So repeat what you did in the first place! Meanwhile, don’t slide into the guy next to you!

Yikes!

All these calculations took place in less than two seconds. Somehow, I kept control of the car. Somehow, we got to our destination safely.

Hills and snow would have been challenging with automatic transmission, too. But for those of us who have been driving for more than 60 years, PRNDL spells WIMP.

We toughed it out. We prevailed. We actually drove our standard-shift cars. We didn’t just aim them.

And yet, we oldies don’t know everything about motor vehicles.

I rented a car at an airport recently. I found it on the lot. I hopped in. The key sat on the passenger seat. But where was the ignition slot?

I hunted. I used some saucy language. I came up empty.

I returned to the rental counter and announced that there was something wrong with the car I had been assigned.

The salesperson — young, of course — did not smirk. He simply walked me back to the car and pointed to the button that starts it.

I had never seen a push-button starter before.

As I shifted into DRIVE and moved off, I had a vagrant thought.

No one my age will ever carjack a vehicle. Because he might not know how to start it.

Bob Levey is a national award-winning columnist.