As a result, the reports of the death of the manual transmission they are very exaggerated. In just two years, the take-up rate for stick-shift cars has nearly doubled. A new report from The Wall Street Journal using data from JD Power sheds light on how many people are choosing row your own gears in a new car.
The data shows that by 2023, 1.7 percent of all new car purchases have been vehicles with manual transmissions. At first glance, this doesn’t seem like much, but it’s all relative. Go back just one year to 2022 and the manual take rate was just 1.2 percent. This represents an increase of 41.7% in just one year. Of course, these are small numbers, but this is a trend in the right direction, my friends.
The news is even better when you look back at 2021, the worst year for manual transmissions. Only 0.9 percent of new vehicles sold in America were equipped with a stick-shift in ’21. This means that in just two years, the manual transmission rate skyrocketed by 88.9 percent. That’s almost double, baby.
It’s not just new cars either. WSJthe report of cites Autotrader data showing that used car buyers are searching for manual vehicles at a greater rate. We don’t have absolute before-and-after numbers, but the used car search website has apparently seen a 13% increase in page views for manual cars so far in 2023 compared to last year.
The reason for this upswing? young people! We reported this earlier millennials and zillennials are fueling this upward trend in manual transmission sales. Youngsters love vinyl records and point-and-shoot cameras. Apparently, this analog fascination extends to stick shifts as well.
It’s an especially interesting trend when you look at the fact that more and more people are giving up their internal combustion vehicles in favor of electric vehicles. In an increasingly digitized and automated world, sometimes rowing your own gears is enough to give you a taste of the good old days.
