As it turns out, the reports of the death of the manual transmission greatly magnified. In just two years, the rate of getting cars to shift gears has nearly doubled. A new report from The Wall Street Journal uses data from JD Power to shed light on how many people are choosing paddle their own gear in a new car.
In case you lost it:
The data shows that so far in 2023, 1.7% of all new car purchases are vehicles with a manual transmission. On the surface, that doesn’t sound like much, but everything is relative. Go back to just a year before 2022 and the manual recall rate is just 1.2 percent. That’s a 41.7 percent increase in just one year. Sure, they’re small numbers, but it’s a trend in the right direction, my friends.
The news is even better when you look back at 2021 – the worst year for a manual transmission. Only 0.9% of new cars sold in the US were equipped with paddle shifters in ’21. That means in just two years, manual transmission usage rates have increased by 88.9%. That’s almost twice that, honey.
It’s not just new cars, either. WSJreport of Citing data from Autotrader, used car buyers are looking for manual transmissions with higher speeds. We don’t have absolute before and after numbers, but the used car search site has clearly seen a 13% increase in pageviews for manual cars so far in 2023 compared to last year. .
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The reason for this increase? Young people! We previously reported that Millennials and zillennials are driving this upward trend in manual transmission sales. Young people love vinyl and point-and-shoot cameras. It’s clear that the same passion extends to gears as well.
It’s a particularly interesting trend when you look at the fact that more and more people are abandoning internal combustion vehicles in favor of electric vehicles. In an increasingly digitized and automated world, sometimes driving your own gears is enough to give you a taste of the good old days.
