Originally Posted By: Quattro Pete
SeaJay, I agree. Although in many other countries, manuals are still selling in very large numbers, so it'll be quite a long time before the manufactures will completely stop making them. But in places like US, having to offer a manual trans for a very small market does become costly... you have to certify it with EPA, you have to teach the techs how to service it, it requires different ECU programming, etc. So the manufacturers are intentionally making you jump through hoops to get one, in hopes of reducing the sales to the point when they will just say "We see no market for it, so we are stopping the sale of manuals altogether. Good day!"
Quote:
But the genie is out of the bottle, and people mostly prefer the automatics.
With me at least, it is not that I prefer an automatic, but I'm kind of forced to getting it these days since the manual options are really restricted. Often times only base models will offer the manual trans option, and then you have to special order it, and then put up with a poor implementation guarded by all sorts of electronic nannies that just sap all the joy out of driving a manual. It gets to the point where you give up and settle for an automatic.
I don't know how costly making a manual available could really be, compared to say, making a RHD version of a car. They only sell 2.5 million cars per year in the UK in total!(Same as the F150 alone in the US) And they probably have close to 10x as many models and drivetrain combinations available to them, than we can get?
Even if a manufacturer only gets a 5% take for a manual in a model here, they still probably sell more manuals than all the rhd versions of that model in the UK...