998 AutoThe auto was the first one I drove and, having just had a spin in a 1275 EFi with a race cam, the review may be a little biased.
It was slow. If given enough time, and a steep enough hill, you may just overtake a glacier. Several times I pulled out into traffic, thinking that I had enough room to get up to speed. Yet, each time i found myself "Going for the Whip" and cringing behind the steering wheel as the traffic barrelled down on me. The folks at <<insert 80 company names here>> had obviously decided that 1500 rpm was enough revs to make the change to the next gear up.
For the rest of my journey, i took the backstreets and found that it makes a nice little cruiser, once you get it up to the speed limit.
The next part of the journey gave me the opportunity to tackle some hills. When I say tackle, i'm being a little misleading, unless you imagine Andrew Johns trying to bring down a cow.
A cow the size of a house.
Poor is the only word to describe it. Deciding to take the back road up to the hills (avoiding the 7% gradient freeway) i found myself, regularly, in 1st gear flat out at 10-20 kph going for the whip again.
There were moments where i needed to re-enter the freeway to get to the next back road and, even with a bit of run-up, 60kph was all the little guy could muster. The next short stint had a much larger run up and i was able to get up to 100kph, but more importantly, i was able to get the revs up into the "power" band. Once there, even with a slight incline, I could keep it at the speed limit until I exited half a kilometre later.
But once we got back onto the flat and downhills, the cruising nature of "The little engine that almost could" came back and everything was nice and relaxed again. Until I ran out of petrol. But that's irrelevant.

Recomendation? A 1 litre auto is nice little runabout engine, suitable for areas without main roads, other cars or hills that go up.
first gear takes a bit to get going off the line, which can ruin merging attempts.. it seems to wanna go straight for 4th gear..
shifting manually, it goes alright for what it is, and once up to speed its not bad.
hills are a problem, even manually shifting.. a runup is required