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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 janrinok on Sunday November 10 2019, @08:42AM
No, you learn to be in the correct gear before entering a roundabout, and manual changes are not unexpected. I specifically stated 'unexpected' gear changes and I have not found an automatic that does it correctly all of the time,
Privately, I've been driving for over 40 years now, and apart from 1 vehicle, they have all been manual. Manual changes are not something that you have to mentally calculate, they are as natural as pressing the accelerator to go faster or the brake to slow or stop. The position of the gear stick tells you which gear you are in - not that I ever have to think about it. I _know_ which gear I am in. However, in the military I have had to use automatic on occasion - until they were withdrawn from the role that I was employed in because they just couldn't manage the off-road requirements, which I will acknowledge were pretty extreme.
As an aside, in Bosnia we discovered that the Land Rover could get to places that the HumVee couldn't - the HV was just too big and heavy. Great for comfort, but the military doesn't put that too high on the list. The LR would go off-road/track through the forests between the trees that the HV just couldn't match. And the LR's manual gearbox got us out of several sticky situations which avoided the need to dig ourselves out. However, this is all anecdotal and is probably just because of the type of terrain the vehicle is optimised for,
I agree that cars are far more reliable nowadays but, from experience, when there is a problem you can usually limp to somewhere that can remedy the fault with a manual transmission rather than have to call the break down recovery service. That saves money.