Maybe my standards for creeping are different than others but turning off the hill hold isn't good enough when you're trying to maneuver through a small neighborhood gas station in the five boroughs with a 45 foot tank on the fifth wheel, with a manual these maneuvers aren't a problem.
Been hauling tanks close to 30 years now with a roughly equal mix of fuel tanks and smooth bores as well as road and local work, you don't need to explain surge to me. Once you learn to read the load and work with it shifting smoothly doesn't take much effort/attention at all.
There's a lot more to handling a truck than steering and braking.
This may be right, I don't know much about what you're running over there. I just know that I don't like what we have here. I wouldn't doubt what you're saying though because while Europe does seem to readily adopt new stuff the American trucking industry has until recently taken more of a if it's not broke don't fix it approach.
PS: The vast majority of my experience is in tanker work and in tanker work it's all about reading the movement of the load and working in harmony with it. With a manual I can work with the load without problems, with any automatic that I've driven the timing has always been off. They don't have the ability to anticipate what the load is going to do next and work with it.
In a nutshell I think most of my issues with autos is that all they can do is react to the situation they are presented with, they don't have the ability to anticipate what's coming so they can work with it.
