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EVs are now outselling manual transmissions in the US
The manual transmission continues to have a pretty tough time here in America, with buyers avoiding manual-transmission cars in record numbers. Such record numbers that now EV sales have surpassed sales of vehicles with manual transmissions, according to data from J.D. Power and reported recently by Driving.ca.
Why is that important? Well, the venerable stick shift has been around since someone decided that cars needed more than one gear. While its previous popularity has been eclipsed by the automatic transmission for decades, the manual transmission has managed to hang on.
According to J.D. Power, manual transmissions have approximately 1.1% market penetration in America, which for many enthusiasts is a fairly grim figure to see. Comparatively, electric vehicles -- which have really only been commercially available to the public for the last decade or so -- now represent 1.9% of car sales in the US.
A big chunk of the reason for this likely lies in good old-fashioned availability. The manual transmission used to be the cheap transmission of choice. It was what you got when you were buying a small, affordable car and didn't want to shell out several thousand dollars for an automatic.
Now, most of those same small, affordable cars are only sold as automatics. The manual transmission was also traditionally the way you'd go if you wanted to buy a high-performance car because old automatics were often slow to shift and shifted at the wrong time. That's also changed, with many of the most high-performing models from companies offered with either paddle-shifted dual-clutch transmissions or performance-tuned automatics.
It was only a matter of time as fewer and fewer cars with manual transmissions are being manufactured at the same time as more and more electric vehicles are being built. Who here saw this coming so soon?
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 09 2019, @01:49PM (1 child)
If, like me, you do a lot of overlanding and travelling long hours along remote dirt roads, you wouldn't be caught dead behind the wheel of a vehicule with automatic transmission.
If your automatic transmission breaks in the middle of the forest 200 miles from the nearest human settlement, you're stuck on the side of the road. Period.
If somethings breaks in my manual transmission (which is extremely unlikely) in the same circumstances, I can still always get myself out of the woods, even if I have to drive the whole way in reverse.
(Score: 2) by Pslytely Psycho on Saturday November 09 2019, @02:27PM
More than once have I driven a synchronized manual car the same way I drove non-synchronized semi-trucks by floating the gears. I've had linkages come apart, cables break, always at the worst possible time. When I would come off the road I frequently found myself floating my 5 speed '96 Camaro for the first couple of days. Got pretty damn good at it too. It's a tad more difficult with a synchronized transmission but quite doable.
Same problem with an automatic and your pretty much calling a tow truck.....
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