Totally agree. My first car as a teenager lacked power steering (and coincidentally the AC did not work). No power steering isn't so bad when you're in transit but the slower you go, the worse it gets.
Summers spent parallel parking that pig left me pouring sweat.
After harbouring the idea for quite some time (mostly out of fear/FOMO of never learning to drive a manual) I finally gave it up and I will be buying an AMT car (even though the lessons I took were in manuals which are still very mainstream in my country and AMTs are catching up). I realised life is too small to put your wrists, elbows, knees, ankles, and shoulders (did I miss anything?) through this torture esp. in a traffic hell like my city.
One time, I was driving across New Mexico, and we heard something break under the hood. No point in stopping to see what it was; we might as well drive it as far as we can until it stops. All was fine, going along the same perfectly straight section of highway for around 2 hours, until we made it to the next city and went to turn down a street - oof! It was then very apparent the power steering pump went out.
The serpentine belt in my wife's F250 Super Duty snapped one day. How she made it home and parked that beast without power steering I'll never know. At least it happened close to home!
> Power steering and power brakes were added to accommodate female drivers.
This is a myth. Power steering and power brakes were developed to make driving easier and safer for all drivers as vehicles became larger and heavier. Some of the advertising from the era framed the features as helpful to female drivers, but this was just that- advertising.
I'm not so sure that was a myth. My dad drove long before power brakes. Women often had trouble executing a hard stop due to the pedal force required, along with the primitive brakes. He said the term "women drivers" came about because of the difficulty they had muscling the controls in emergency conditions. (Power steering, too.)
They also wanted to sell cars to little old ladies.
That power steering/brakes made the experience easier for women doesn't mean they were implemented for women, though, and there's no evidence that this was the reasoning behind their invention (e.g. power steering was first used en masse in large trucks in 1938, which few women would've been driving). These features made the driving experience easier for everyone, and so were originally luxury features when first implemented for cars (the Chrysler Imperial being the first mass-produced car to have power steering, known as "Hydraguide").
