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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 09 2019, @05:34PM (2 children)
The problem with electric trucks is that they are expected to operate far from the major urban centers where it's possible to recharge, so range becomes a problem again. Especially if you're towing.
Semi-automatic transmissions are garbage. The "only shifts when you tell it to" is not at all how they behave. They still shift any time they please. Mostly they allow you to downshift before you start to accelerate instead of hunting for gears after, but if the transmission decides it doesn't like the gear you picked, it hunts for gears anyway. They're not too great at the downshifting part, either. With a manual transmission you decide "I need third gear for this situation" and shift into third gear. With a manual transmission you think "I wonder what gear the transmission is in, and whether it is going to let me shift into third, and how many times I have to push the shifter to get there, and if I push it too fast or too slow it's not going to take it, and it's probably going to shift again anyway, and... " It's just not useful.
Supposedly the 4th generation Ram 2500/3500 actually has a decent pretend-manual mode, but I've never driven one, just the play pretend manuals from Mazda and Toyota, which are not useful.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Saturday November 09 2019, @05:50PM
That's a good point, manual does force you to keep track of what gear you're actually in. You could do so in an automatic but that's a matter of discipline rather than necessity... which means almost nobody is going to do it.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Saturday November 09 2019, @05:55PM
As for range - do you often drive several hundred miles in a day? Because you don't have to go to urban areas to recharge - one of the nice things about rural areas is that it's easy to run an extension cord out to your vehicle and recharge overnight. Don't even need to drive in to town to go to the gas station.