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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: 3, Insightful) by Immerman on Saturday November 09 2019, @03:50PM (7 children)
>makes a manual pointless as there's no longer a performance or economy or reliability gain by going manual.
There is still a control factor - one of the biggest complaints I've heard about automatic transmissions is that they tend to shift at inopportune moments. And as any race car driver knows, you need to be very careful deciding when to shift, because you lose a lot of traction and control over your vehicle for a moment while the engine spins up or down to match speed with the wheels.
Of course semi-automatic transmissions/paddle-shifters can address that quite a bit, but I don't recall seeing a lot of that in pickup trucks for some reason.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Saturday November 09 2019, @08:10PM
Yeah, in turns. I'm surprised the zillions of engine computers and transmission computers don't have a steering wheel position feed plus or minus an accelerometer feed to influence that decision.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 09 2019, @10:02PM (5 children)
The easy solution to that is a CVT. I had manuals exclusively up until my current vehicle, as I grew up and learned to drive in the mountains. Now I've got a hybrid with a CVT, and I love the smooth acceleration (and not having to shift in city traffic). Unfortunately, I seem to be in a minority in that opinion, and people love the shift sensation so much you get stuff like Lexus' new over-complicated hybrid with the fake-shifting sensation.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Saturday November 09 2019, @11:41PM (4 children)
When I was a teenager I had a minibike with a CVT: belt with 2 cone pulleys with mechanisms to vary the width of the cone. It was cool to hear the engine at speed, and you felt yourself accelerating. I miss that thing. Many golf carts and other utility vehicles use them.
CVT seems like a really good thing. I don't know how reliable they are, or longevity, or how expensive to repair though.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 10 2019, @08:00AM
the old jazz/fit had a i-DSi and CVT. the engine was 1.5 liters, 4 cylinder with eight (8!) spark plugs.
the CVT has 6 "fake" gears which steering wheel paddel could control in "manual" mode.
it would keep the manually set gear faithful until going above engine red line ... then it would override.
add some light rims and light rubber and it was fun to drive with only 98 ps.
also it was possible to "engine break" this way. shifting to lower gear when approaching a ripe red light or overtaking.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Sunday November 10 2019, @03:02PM (1 child)
My grandparents had a golf cart with one and using mid last century technology it used springs and a rubber belt and the belt longevity was about what you'd expect from a tire.
For a golf cart it was no big deal and one human could unbolt the transmission and lift it with one hand while installing a new (cheap and small) belt.
So for a car you'd need something as heavy duty and expensive as four tires worth of torque, and nobody has engineered a way to replace a beast of a belt like that quickly and cheaply.
There were application layer problems, where you can weld a trailer hitch to the back to tow boats in and out of the lake, but getting water in there screwed stuff up. We worked around the hitch weight "problem" by having kids stand on the back of boats. Note that it takes a $80K pickup truck to tow a pontoon boat at 90 mph up a hill, but a $500 used golf cart works fine up to walking speed or so, although sometimes on the ramp people had to help push.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Sunday November 10 2019, @07:32PM
You have me chuckling: I've messed with cars a bit- not a big hotrodder but a little. I'm imagining a slipping-belt transmission making a lot of smoke behind a supercharged V8. In fact, the friction would liquefy or vaporize the belt pretty quickly.
My dad used to tell me about the first "automatic transmission"- the Buick "DynaFlow". It had 2 forward speeds using a complicated fluid-coupled torque converter and planetary gears and you had to shift it. Evidently it was not impressive.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 11 2019, @02:48PM
Can't speak to repair costs, but mine has almost 150k miles on it and hasn't had an issue. Not a lightweight, either, as it's in an LS600hl, which is a 5 liter V8 hybrid.