Automatic transmissions back then were quite the hydraulic maze, as they operated entirely on hydraulics. These days, they're electronically controlled. I don't think the failure rate has changed.
In a manual, you can of course clutch out as long as your clutch cable (or hose for hydraulic clutched cars) doesn't fail, which is not an option you have for automatics. These kinds of failures do occur today, though. See the famous Toyota "unintentional acceleration" scandal, where a software error read "0% throttle" as "100% THROTTLE GO GO GO GO", causing death in a few cases. There's also a case of a person that was stuck in a car that could not stop, driving at constantly increasing speed on the highways of France, IIRC. He couldn't turn the car off or get it out of gear. You can disengage a manual if you're quick with an intact clutch cable, but you're a bit lost in an automatic, especially if it's too powerful to hold on the brake.
Up here, manuals are normal (with automatics slowly getting more and more popular), mostly because everyone knows just fine how to drive them, and automatics are much more expensive. I, personally, can't decide which I prefer. I'd much rather drive fully manual than a "retrofitted" automatic like the one in a Lupo 3L, and I still have to try a dual clutch transmission, for which I might end up having similar opinions. They always seem to change wrong, the changes are rough and slow, and the clutch engagement is very binary, leading to odd engage/disengage.
I like conventional automatics in cars that haul heavy loads (pushing a 4 metric tonne trailer over a curb in reverse at low speeds without the possibility of gaining some speed first make you worry a lot about your clutch in a manual), and our busses and trucks are generally fully automatic, with more gears than you would bother counting.
In a manual, you can of course clutch out as long as your clutch cable (or hose for hydraulic clutched cars) doesn't fail, which is not an option you have for automatics. These kinds of failures do occur today, though. See the famous Toyota "unintentional acceleration" scandal, where a software error read "0% throttle" as "100% THROTTLE GO GO GO GO", causing death in a few cases. There's also a case of a person that was stuck in a car that could not stop, driving at constantly increasing speed on the highways of France, IIRC. He couldn't turn the car off or get it out of gear. You can disengage a manual if you're quick with an intact clutch cable, but you're a bit lost in an automatic, especially if it's too powerful to hold on the brake.
Up here, manuals are normal (with automatics slowly getting more and more popular), mostly because everyone knows just fine how to drive them, and automatics are much more expensive. I, personally, can't decide which I prefer. I'd much rather drive fully manual than a "retrofitted" automatic like the one in a Lupo 3L, and I still have to try a dual clutch transmission, for which I might end up having similar opinions. They always seem to change wrong, the changes are rough and slow, and the clutch engagement is very binary, leading to odd engage/disengage.
I like conventional automatics in cars that haul heavy loads (pushing a 4 metric tonne trailer over a curb in reverse at low speeds without the possibility of gaining some speed first make you worry a lot about your clutch in a manual), and our busses and trucks are generally fully automatic, with more gears than you would bother counting.