Is there a better way to experience San Francisco than in a 1966 Beetle with a manual transmission?

Not if you're San Francisco resident Ben Ramirez, who moves around his car's stick shift with remarkable speed and finesse, resting the palm of his hand over the lemon-yellow button at the end of the silver wand.

We whirl around Coit Tower on a balmy summer day, taking in postcard views of sailboats crisscrossing the bay, and then cruise around North Beach, Russian Hill and Nob Hill. These quintessential SF neighborhoods seem all the more charming with the sound effects of a vintage car at play: roar, chug, chug, chug, clickety-clack, shake, shake, rattle, rattle.

Ramirez fearlessly tackles hills, and uses the emergency brake only once when we're forced to stop behind another car on Jones Street. The car doesn't fall back even an inch.

He presses on the gas as we head down Leavenworth Street, and the car seems to get some Steve McQueen-worthy air.

"You have to listen to the car when you drive stick," says Ramirez, who has his own design company. "You're more connected. It's more fun. I think it's because you're not just pressing on the gas... you have to coax it to do things. You're touching the car more. There's a physical connection."

In a city on the forefront of technology, where autonomous vehicles are on the horizon (if not already here), Ramirez is part of a small yet steadfast group of people who drive stick shift—which is impressive when you consider the city's roller-coaster hills might make it among the most challenging places in the world for manual transmissions.

San Francisco's stick-shift holdouts say they're more connected to the driving experience. They say they're better, focused drivers as a car with a stick and pedal requires use of all four limbs: "You can't shift and text," Ramirez says.

They rave about smooth gear changes and understand friction point, and they also possess remarkable knowledge of things such as horsepower and torque. When I talk to S.F. resident Emmett Quigley, a former semi-pro race car driver with a 1966 Mustang GT Fastback, he speaks another language as he gets technical, very, very fast.

Quigley tells me a way he likes to drive using a heel-and-toe technique to downshift. "You can put the ball of your right foot on the brake pedal, and kind of tilt your ankle out so your heel is on the gas and you can switch between gas and brake," he explains.

Quigley has a 16-year-old son and he's looking forward to teaching him to drive stick.

"But I'm going to borrow a friend's pickup truck with a lighter clutch to do it," he says. "The Mustang is unforgiving. Very heavy clutch."

ALSO: The best cars to buy slightly used vs. new in the Bay Area and U.S.

The number of stick-shift drivers in San Francisco is unknown, but national data shows sales of cars with manual transmission have been dying for decades. They accounted for just 2 percent of all vehicles sold in 2018, according to data from Edmunds.com.

Audi, part of Volkswagen Group, stopped making manual-transmission vehicles in the U.S. beginning with the 2019 model year.

SF Royal Auto — with dealerships representing Audi, Mazda, VW and Volvo — sells about 300 cars a month and 10 of those, at most, have manual transmissions.

"Usually it's performance cars, sports cars," says David Kalaustov, director of sales at Royal. "We sell the VW GTI, the VW Golf, the Mazda Miata."

Lorenzo Au has worked the floor at Royal's dealerships in the city for 16 years and says a customer recently scooped up a used 2009 Audi S-5 coupe with a manual transmission, the first car with a stick that he'd sold in years.

"If you find a newer manual model, the clutches are light and the shifters are smooth," says Au. "It's a fantastic connected drive you don't get with an automatic. It's not like back in the '60s or '70s when the clutches were heavy. Now, the shifting is very precise. Unfortunately, fewer manufacturers don't see that it makes financial sense to produce manual any more."

It used to be stick shifts gave you better gas mileage, but Au says now with the new technology, automatic cars are the winners.

MORE: The most scenic routes near the Bay Area

Ramirez has been driving stick since he had a 1965 Beetle in high school living in Stockton; it was the same cream color as his current car. For him, a huge part of the fun of owning a stick is the nostalgia factor.

"When I met my wife I was driving the '65 Beetle," he says. "We'd take my bug and drive into San Francisco."

He's not the only one who's holding onto the past. Darlene Bahrs of S.F. says she still cruises the city in her 1967 yellow VW convertible. "Took my friends and I to Woodstock in it in 1969," says Bahrs. "When the top goes down, you might be amazed what we are able to transport in it. We recently took apart an IKEA loft bed with a desk attached through the SOMA."

ALSO: Dirt roads in San Francisco? A few still remain, and they're delightful

Back in the car with Ramirez, we stop at the top of Jones Street to admire a view of Alcatraz. Some German tourists start taking photos of the Beetle.

I hop out of the car to chat with Alexandra Bishop of Berlin and ask her about the culture around manual transmissions in her country.

Bishop happens to drive a cherry-red 1995 Beetle with a stick and she says sticks are the norm in Germany.

I ask her about the hills in San Francisco and whether she could get going if her car were stopped on one.

"I don't think so," Bishop says. "We don't have hills like this in my city."

Share your stories and photos from driving a stick shift in San Francisco in the comments or send them to agraff@sfgate.com. We'll be posting readers' memories in an upcoming story.

Amy Graff is a Digital Editor at SFGATE. Email: agraff@sfgate.com