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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: 2) by theluggage on Saturday November 09 2019, @06:37PM
As do the majority of drivers here in the UK - Automatics are increasing in popularity recently, but still only ~40% of sales and that doesn't reflect all the manuals still on the road.
At the moment, if you take your test in an automatic, you aren't licensed to drive a manual, so most people learn to drive a manual. That and there is a perception (doesn't matter if it is true or not) that autos use more fuel - and fuel is much more expensive here.
It probably will be the (fundamentally automatic) electric/hybrid car that kills off the manual here - its only a matter of time until someone complains about all the polar bears being murdered by driving schools, and changing the law on driving tests would be a cheap and easy bit of greenwashing for the gubment (...and probably would drive a lot of older, inefficient manual cars off the road if younglings didn't want to buy second-hand manuals... y'know it might even be a good 'nudge' strategy).