Sounds as though you've had an interesting time driving a variety of vehicles knight.

As Grumpy indicates there are cars & indeed many vans that even today use 'robotised manual gearboxes'. Everything from the clutch to the gear change is automated. You could even buy a transit with this type of transmission at one time. Hyundai make a really nice current model i10 with a robotised gearbox. It's 5 spd with a 1250 engine. It goes quite well apparently.

An interesting point which arises from all of the above is that there has not really been a transmission innovation which has been implemented with complete success at the first attempt. For decades of the last century there were only two major types of automatic transmission used in the majority of european vehicles. The market was satisfied with three or four speed boxes and the fluid flywheel type of torque converter/automatic clutch. These were developed slowly over long periods and as a result became reliable though horribly inefficient and not much fun to drive in anything other than a sedate manner. In recent times the demand for fuel efficiency has required different designs which had to fit in with the pressure to bring them into production on a two year cycle. It is not surprising that no manufacturer has got everything right first time but it is the customer who ultimately had to pay for the interim designs before the likes of Toyota (cars) and Honda (bikes and cars) ironed out the niggles and unreliability.

P.S. From my own ownership experience the worst of these modern designs was the 9-speed ZF used by Landrover and many others. Youtube will turn up plenty of dissatisfied owners for that one.

I usually don't mind fettling bikes, even the Tmax although doing anything other than dropping the oil & filter can be a right twat when you have the jigsaw of a dozen interlocking body panels to remove. I have no idea why they built them to be such a pain to work on. I'm having a "Tmax day" soon on mine now the weather is warming up a bit where I will clear some garage space then tear the bugger down and replace the clutch, primary belt (early), do another oil/filter service (early) and strip and rebuild the front brake calipers and replace the brake fluid. For my daily commute of 12 miles each way on a mix of urban roads and motorway, my Tmax fits the bill perfectly for me.

Data, the reason for my interest in all the different gearboxes is, I didn't take my HGV test until I was 52 ( I had worked in the GRP industry for 25 years and had repetetive strain injury I'd had both wrist operated on 18 months later neede both elbows doing ) so driving seemed like a good idea. I'll be the first to admit I knew very little about HGV's, I knew they had range change and splitters but it never occured to me every make would be different, naive I know but I enjoyed learning the different boxes. The truck I learnt on had a six speed box which didn't help.
Sorry for hijacking the thread my last post on the subject.