Porsche, Ferrari, etc all commanded huge premiums this year for their manual versions. Specifically among younger buyers and first time buyers! You even see this effect downmarket - Toyota promised to never make a manual version of their Supra, then just this last year they put together a cobbled transmission to save their car.
Manuals are also an order of magnitude less complex and cheaper - so automakers will still have some incentive to include them on small budget cars to keep down their base MSRP (even if they don't offer a ton of them). It helps that in most other countries, manuals are still king.
Finally, manual transmissions are overrepresented on the used market. Because manual cars are roughly half as complex as automatics, that translates to many fewer components going bad over time. Less likely to die = cars that stay circulating in the market longer. So if you buy used cars, the options for manuals increases dramatically.
The real issue isn't the demise of manual transmissions. It's the upcoming demise of transmissions entirely as electrification continues it's march towards ubiquity.
You need a lot more mining and environmental destruction to get enough batteries for replacing all cars with electric vehicles. Kind of wondering if maybe one day we could have safe micro reactors that can power vehicles.
A similar amount of mining would be required for the steel, aluminum, and plastic needed to build brand new ICE cars. And ICE cars require constant mining of petroleum just to use the car. The key difference with electric cars is that mining is not necessary to use the car (as long as you charge it with renewable electricity).
The environmental damage from the use phase of ICE vehicles dwarfs the environmental damage from their construction, because use is continuous and ongoing while construction only happens once. Getting rid of the continuous pollution of ICE cars is a major win.
Well given that the current approach is to dump emissions directly into the atmosphere, I'll take the alternative.
Obviously EVs are a suboptimal solution. The real solution to transportation energy use is to switch to walking, biking, and transit as the principle mode of transportation,while switching freight mostly back to rail.
If you could just walk or bike where you wanted to go (ie, land use is good where you live), than these problems become much smaller.
Seems promising. The lead candidate previously for matching cobalt without the cobalt was lithium-vanadium-phosphate, but it has a variable voltage output that makes it difficult to work with.
While that is often true, it isn't always the case. If you are using a lot of gas (driving a lot, high consumption), replacing it with an electric car can very quickly be more environmental friendly. If you are not using a lot of gas, like only driving your car infrequently, keeping your old car running might be better though.
What would very quickly mean? Do you have some data perhaps on the breakpoints regarding this? I'm not dismissive of your statement, just want to see some data.
the amount of metal harvested to achieve ubiquity electrification is nowhere near enough... this march could take quite some time if we don't invent something new fast
> You even see this effect downmarket - Toyota promised to never make a manual version of their Supra, then just this last year they put together a cobbled transmission to save their car.
They didn't say never, just that it was unlikely. I think the new Nissan Z scared them into offering one. The timing was too perfect to be coincidental. From the lead engineer a few years ago:
> Tada said he knows people keep asking for a manual in the Supra and in time, after customers have driven the Supra with the automatic, if they are still clamoring for a manual, he will consider it. "It is not out of the question to see an update like that."[1]
Haha! Fair enough. I remember at the time this was considered bell tolling for manuals. And then a couple years later Toyota is showing up with their tail between their legs.
I had a VW bug in high school that had some kind of short that would constantly drain the battery. I just got in the habit of parking on a small rise, i could put the car in neutral, roll down, pop the clutch and off i went. The fuel gauage also didn't work but i could pop the clutch then hit the brakes and turn off the engine and listen to the gas slosh to get an idea of how much gas i had. Speedometer didn't work either but didn't seem to be much of a problem. heh reverse also didn't work... not much worked on that car. it sure was fun though.
btw my little sister took-it-without-asking/stole it and crashed it when she was 14 :(
I had an E46 330Ci that was just a joy to drive. Those in-line sixes are bulletproof, and the six-speed manual never failed to bring a smile to my face. Great cars, annoying upkeep
Used and vintage Ferrari's have premiums on the manual version if you can find one. They pushed the F1 gearbox hard from its introduction with the 355. Ferrari hasn't even built a car with a manual transmission since 2012, and in the mid 2000s manuals were under 10% of their builds. 599 was the last car they made with a stick, and even that was only 30 of 600 cars.
Porsche was ready to kill their manual with the 991.1 911 GT3 being PDK only, but there was enough outcry they brought it back for 991.2 and 992. The recently unveiled 992 GT3 RS is PDK only since it's a true track car and PDK puts in faster lap times. Even the revived GT 6-speed only accounts for a fraction of their builds and the 7-speed is hardly ordered on the regular 911 at all.
They’re remarkably popular in developing economies, even with their emerging middle classes. The manual model of a typical family sedan is usually at least a couple thousand USD cheaper, which is enough to make manual the most popular option in a lot of places.
That being said I own a 991.1 C2S w/ 7MT and I'm never upgrading bc I don't want a turbo and I'm not into the GT3 anymore as I stopped going to the track
I'm the current owner of one, had it since 2013 from New, I absolutely love it. It's a blast to drive when you want to, it gets 30 mpg when you want to, is reliable, and low cost to insure and repair. I wouldn't trade all those plus' for more speed. I'm still refining my driving, learning to drive better. Like they say, it's more fun to drive a slow car fast than a fast car slow.
Huge premiums != large market. It just means the market is bigger than their production.
Manual transmissions are not "an order of magnitude less complex and cheaper." They're far more expensive because the volume is much lower and every configuration has to be crash-tested, so the cost of that crash testing is amortized over a much, much smaller number of vehicles.
Manual transmission vehicles get significantly worse mileage and this drags down the fleet emissions which means they need to spend significantly more pushing out low or zero emission vehicles, or can't produce as many SUVs and trucks, where the profit margins are highest.
Porsche and Ferrari don't represent the market as a whole, or any significant portion of it. Both are acquired to a large degree as investments - they often appreciate in value if well-cared for, or at least lose significantly less value compared to the average vehicle.
People are buying manual transmission vehicles because they're rare and likely to appreciate in value more, not because they're better in any sense. They get worse gas mileage, are slower, and less capable. Dual-clutch gearboxes can shift fast enough that the limitation in them is the rotational inertia of the engine, to the point that there's little or no interruption in delivered torque, thus enabling shifts without upsetting the balance of the car. No manual transmission car can be up/down shifted during track in / cornering / trackout without upsetting the car's balance; dual-clutch gearbox cars can be. And lastly, they can have more gears.
Early gearboxes had longevity issues (clutches) but that's largely been sorted out and is no worse than manual transmission cars.
> No manual transmission car can be up/down shifted during track in / cornering / trackout without upsetting the car's balance; dual-clutch gearbox cars can be.
Speak for yourself, but I don't really have much of an issue shifting while going hot through a corner.
> And lastly, they can have more gears.
Why is this better? Fuel efficiency, sure, but are we going for a Fast and the Furious race scene shifting thing?
> Manual transmissions are not "an order of magnitude less complex and cheaper."
Don't take my word for it. Just look at the size of a manual drivetrain vs an automatic. The increase in steel is directly proportional to the engineering required/number of moving parts.
>Manual transmission vehicles get significantly worse mileage
While it's true that CVTs have finally surpassed manuals for fuel efficiency, I think you are largely overstating the difference. We are taking about 1 to 2 MPG difference.
Dual clutches are certainly faster, but again they are huge and complex things. And not more efficient. Among car enthusiasts, they are becoming about as popular as devices that chew your food for you - technically superior, but who cares?
>Early gearboxes had longevity issues (clutches) but that's largely been sorted out and is no worse than manual transmission cars.
I don't know how someone can take this seriously. A Nissan CVT is not even serviceable - you literally have to swap the entire unit when it goes bad. Which costs more than a used Nissan! Meanwhile a comparable manual will run as long as it's engine.
Again, there's fundamentally half as many moving parts in the drive train. You can't escape the laws of thermodynamics.
What you're missing about the cost is that engineering cost is amortized. If you spend $10m on the engineering for the manual, and $100m on the engineering for the automatic, the manual will be way more expensive if you only sell 10 of them.
> No manual transmission car can be up/down shifted during track in / cornering / trackout without upsetting the car's balance;
That auto-rev matching feature is used in DCT cars for smooth down shifting: almost every manual transmission sports car out there has this exact same technology.
Porsche, Ferrari, etc all commanded huge premiums this year for their manual versions. Specifically among younger buyers and first time buyers! You even see this effect downmarket - Toyota promised to never make a manual version of their Supra, then just this last year they put together a cobbled transmission to save their car.
Manuals are also an order of magnitude less complex and cheaper - so automakers will still have some incentive to include them on small budget cars to keep down their base MSRP (even if they don't offer a ton of them). It helps that in most other countries, manuals are still king.
Finally, manual transmissions are overrepresented on the used market. Because manual cars are roughly half as complex as automatics, that translates to many fewer components going bad over time. Less likely to die = cars that stay circulating in the market longer. So if you buy used cars, the options for manuals increases dramatically.