BMW board member Frank Weber uttered the words every car lover on the planet didn’t want to hear when he said manual gearboxes are dying.
Weber said it’s only a matter of time before manual transmissions disappear completely.
The silver lining, if we desperately wanted to find one, is that Weber didn’t provide a deadline for that.
But it’s clear that the end is near.
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The reason why manual gearboxes are dying
As of 2024, there are still cars that offer a manual gearbox option, and people still want them.
High-end manufacturers still do it too.
The newly launched Aston Martin Valiant, for example, has a manual gearbox, and so does the Nilu hypercar, which was developed by a former Koenigsegg engineer.
The problem, once again, has a dollar sign attached to it.
Weber said that sales of manual models are going down year on year, and that’s why development costs for automakers are no longer justified.
Not to mention electric cars don’t even need a gearbox.
Some automakers manufacture their own transmissions, while many more rely on third-party companies.
The problem is that even these companies are no longer pretending this isn’t happening, and are gradually transitioning towards other technologies.
ZF, one of the OGs of the industry, has spent the last few decades diversifying their offer by acquiring several companies to develop new technologies, unrelated to car transmissions.
Different countries want different things
The manual vs automatic transmission debate is one of the best examples of how different countries, and therefore markets, sometimes want completely different things.
In Europe, especially in some countries, a large number of cars are still sold with a manual transmission.
The transition is underway, but it’s slow.
As of 2024, manual transmissions still account for 20-30 percent of sales in countries like Italy.
By contrast, there are countries where manual transmissions never really caught on.
In the US, for example, manual gearboxes are so uncommon they’ve accidentally become an effective anti-theft system.
On more than one occasion, we read stories about thieves who gave up and fled the scene without the stealing the car as they intended to do because they couldn’t drive a manual.
This happens a lot more frequently than people think, it recently happened in Seattle.
The bottom line is, if you want to buy a manual, you’d better hurry up – unfortunately.
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