Auto every time.
I was the first one at our mill to get an i-Shift, Volvo FM9 6x2 with a lifting mid-steer. Odd little thing but it worked quite well.
When I picked it up from our Presteigne mill and drove it back to Carmarthen, I thought it painfully slow off the mark yet when I got to base the overall journey time was only a couple of minutes more, which I’ve since put down to my lack of familiarity. Subsequent trips actually improved the time slightly over similar ones in a manual, and fuel consumption improved dramatically.
Of course, I had all the naysayers; “Best leave the towing eye screwed in, you’ll get stuck on EVERY farm”, etc. In actual fact I only got stuck once, and that would’ve defeated a double drive manual. Once you got used to flipping it into manual on difficult bits such as hairpin bends and farm tracks, the rest was a doddle.
The one thing I have noticed, particularly on my kind of work where you’re up and down the box all the time on back roads, is that my left hip no longer aches like hell after a day’s work.
Have to say, like others, that the i-Shift is in a class of its own; my current Actros wagon and drag sometimes feels like all the cogs are having a union meeting to decide which one goes first. Annoying, but you get used to it.