Quote:
Originally Posted by Red Bread
Meh, I think you realize there are dollar signs at the end of the rainbow. Porsche knows this. Mazda, Jeep, Honda and a tiny little percentage at VW too.
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Not when it costs more to develop -- or, as is almost always the case now, source from a third-party manufacturer -- and certify a manual transmission vehicle than it is to offer it as an option in the first place. THAT is the biggest reason they're disappearing: simple cost effectiveness, combined with supply and demand. Demand has fallen to below four percent worldwide. Again: WORLDWIDE. That's a function of several factors conspiring to kill them.
@5.M0NSTER
flybigjet I'd only owned manuals until three cars ago. I'm nearly 50. I get the allure, and the advantages. However, I've joined the 21st Century ... and, to bring this back to the OP's topic, it means I can consider far more cars as my next one because I've learned to appreciate them, and use them to engage with my car. My advice is to stop resisting and start learning the new way.
EDIT: I'm old enough to remember when folks said the same things about things like carburetion, power windows, and chokes -- much less CD players, analog electromechanical gauges, and manual A/C controls. All of those things save the CD player helped one be more 'a part of' a car.
Some newfangled stuff simply isn't better. Manual, hydraulic-assisted steering, for example, will always be better than the steer-by-wire of today, which is another example of cost effectiveness superseding consumer preference to the point of extinguishing the former. But it's proven that modern high-performance auto transmissions are better in almost every regard than any manual.
You're not going to save them. There simply being phased out by economics, by culture, by governments, by pretty much everyone except old-school performance enthusiasts. And how much influence do you have in the grand scheme of the current auto industry? Zero, nada, zilch, none.