Stick Shifts Are The New Anti Theft Devices
A Changing Market
Manual transmissions account for just 2 percent of all vehicles sold in 2018, according to data from Edmunds.com. In 2006, 47 percent of new models in the U.S. were offered with automatics and manuals. Now it’s down to 20 percent and dropping sharply.
Supercar-makers such as Ferrari and Lamborghini no longer offer manuals for performance reasons.
Look no further than Audi. The luxury automotive brand, part of Volkswagen Group, confirmed that it will no longer offer any manual-transmission vehicles in the U.S. beginning with the 2019 model year. The final Audi models offered with a stick-shift variant were the 2018 A4 sedan and A5 coupe, Audi spokeswoman Amanda Koons said. From now on in the U.S., it’s nothing but automatic transmissions for the German brand.
Back in 2012, only 506,720 cars were registered with automatics. By 2017, that number has more than doubled to 1,016,516. We did some research of our own, and we noticed that total registrations did go up in that time from 2,044,609 in 2012 to 2,692,786 in 2017. Even though we could blame some of the those automatic sales on the increase in car sales, the percentage of automatics compared to manuals went from 24.7% in 2012 to 37.7% in 2017.
This result is bound to be accelerated thanks to the UK's recent ban on gas and diesel vehicles by 2040.