[cookiemech]

Not sure whether my opinions will be helpful to you, since it's such a personal preference . . .

My wife has a Yaris hatchback with the automatic, which would not have been my preference. I have a stick in my Echo, which has a very similar drivetrain. However, after having driven her car a few hundred miles, I have to admit that the automatic makes it extremely easy to drive, and there seems to be very little gas mileage penalty. Brand new, her car gets ~34 mpg commuting to work. When my Echo was new, it saw ~35 mpg and now (at 15,000 miles) is around 39 mpg commuting on that same route.

I always wonder about the longevity of an automatic vs. a manual transmission. However, I do not hear of older Toyota automatics dropping like flies (other than some problems with early Tundra transmissions).

So I can't come down strongly on one side or the other. If I were buying a Yaris today I'd probably get a manual transmission, but it absolutely would be because I like to shift gears. For commuting purposes, and objectively speaking, the automatic probably makes more sense, and really doesn't have a downside.