First of all, those are not engine types, they are transmission types. But who cares about terminology anyway

A manual prelude is one with a manual transmission. There's a clutch pedal in this car, and you shift gears manually by working the clutch with your left foot, and moving through the gears with your right hand.

An automatic prelude has an automatic transmission, which shifts for you the whole time.

An SS transmission is something special, it's sort of a combination of a manual and an automatic. Some people call it a Manumatic. Weird. It is an automatic transmission, but with a special feature called SS (stands for Sequential Shift, or something like that). You see, it will shift the gears automatically for you the whole time if you like, or you can move the gear select over a notch, and shift the gears your self. There is however, no clutch, and you can only click the lever up or down to change the gears. There is no H pattern like there is on a manual.



You see in this picture that you can select Drive, Park, and all that normall jazz that an automatic has, but in the D4 slot, you can move the gear select to the right a notch, and click the gears up and down (the + and -)

You might think that an SS transmission is the best of both worlds, but without a clutch pedal, I don't think it captures everything a manual tranny can be.

When you ask the car salesman about these things, he'll probably convince you that the auto tranny or the SS tranny is the best, simply because that is what he's selling.

Keep us posted.