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The Disappearing Stick Shift: Less Than 3% of Cars Sold in the U.S. Have Manual Transmissions

posted by martyb on Friday November 18 2016, @01:52AM   Printer-friendly
from the lost-art-of-double-clutching dept.

Phoenix666 writes:

Visitors to the upcoming Los Angeles Auto Show will see supercars, hoverboards, self-propelling luggage and all manner of new transportation options.

But they'll be hard pressed to find a clutch pedal or a stick shift. Available in nearly half of new models in the U.S. a decade ago, the manual transmission is going the way of the rumble seat, with stick availability falling to about a quarter this year.

Once standard equipment on all motor vehicles, preferred for its dependability, fuel efficiency and sporty characteristics, the four-on-the-floor is disappearing from major car manufacturers' lineups — and subsequently from the sprawling auto show's floors.

Consider, too, that electric vehicles don't even have a transmission.

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 18 2016, @06:53PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 18 2016, @06:53PM (#429006)

    A median makes it easier and quicker to see via a graph on the back of an envelope--without doing any complicated arithmetic:

    You have a roomful of guys who make a Blue Collar wage of $50,000.
    Their jobs get exported and the new jobs they find pay $30,000.
    The graph shows that the median goes down to 60 percent of what it had been.

    Now, ONE White Collar guy who is paid[1] $120,000 enters the room.
    Inserting that ONE guy DOUBLES the median to $60,000.

    Now, make the White Collar guy Satya Nadella whose compensation[1] was $1,692,031. [google.com]
    The median now makes a giant jump to ~$846,000.
    Suddenly, EVERYONE in the room is rich.

    Even calculating a mean is a distortion of the current state of the typical working guy's downward spiral vs the 1 Percent since Dubya's economic crash (due in no small part to Slick Willie and exacerbated by Obama).

    [1] Notice that I DIDN'T say that he -earns- that amount.

    It appears that you have some schooling and learned a few words but you didn't actually acquire the knowledge.
    You should have done the assigned homework.

    -- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 18 2016, @09:10PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 18 2016, @09:10PM (#429114)

    Hey --gweg_, you're babbling like an idiot, again.

    YOU are the one who didn't actually acquire the knowledge, and should have done the assigned homework -- then you would know the difference between the median and the mean. I don't know what you think the median is, but you're saying "median" and then making statements that aren't true, and wouldn't be true if you had said "mean" either (for any number of blue-collar guys in the room). In both your examples, the median doesn't change at all, and won't change until you've doubled the number of guys in the room. (Unless your "roomful" is one blue-collar guy, then when you add one white-collar guy, the median is the same as the mean, $75k and $861k respectively.)