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October 9, 2014
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Article Quotes:
These charts from the EPA's report show the production shares of transmissions going back to 1980. The numbers are the gears; the letters "L" and "A" are for automatics, with "L" standing for those with a lockup torque converter, the standard in most vehicles. The green section for "M" shows how modern five-speed manuals peaked around 1987 for cars at 25 percent and in 1990 for trucks at roughly 30 percent, before the great decline set in. (Four- and three-speed manuals had been on the way out long before.)
While car buyers have shunned stick shifts, there's at least a core of holdouts who want to choose their own gear the old-fashioned way; it's still unthinkable to imagine a Ford Mustang or Chevy Camaro without at least a manual option. But in trucks, manuals are all but extinct; the only pickups that still offer manuals are the Nissan Frontier and Toyota Tacoma; all 1-ton models (F-150, Chevy Silverado, Ram) are automatics only. That bump marked "L8" in the top corner of the car and truck charts represents Chrysler's bet on 8-speeds as its major fuel-economy move, even in its lowest-cost models.
The hope I mentioned? You can see that the line for manuals in cars has stopped shrinking — and sure enough, buried deep within the spreadsheets of the EPA's report, lies the data that shows manual transmission cars hit bottom and have started to come back — from 311,618 in the 2011 model year to 452,232 models built in the 2013 model year. The EPA's forecast says manuals should grow again among 2014 models to 6 percent of production. It's still a small share of the market, but it shows there's a growing audience of drivers who doesn't mind having more control over their machines.
October 9, 2014
Article Quotes:
These charts from the EPA's report show the production shares of transmissions going back to 1980. The numbers are the gears; the letters "L" and "A" are for automatics, with "L" standing for those with a lockup torque converter, the standard in most vehicles. The green section for "M" shows how modern five-speed manuals peaked around 1987 for cars at 25 percent and in 1990 for trucks at roughly 30 percent, before the great decline set in. (Four- and three-speed manuals had been on the way out long before.)
While car buyers have shunned stick shifts, there's at least a core of holdouts who want to choose their own gear the old-fashioned way; it's still unthinkable to imagine a Ford Mustang or Chevy Camaro without at least a manual option. But in trucks, manuals are all but extinct; the only pickups that still offer manuals are the Nissan Frontier and Toyota Tacoma; all 1-ton models (F-150, Chevy Silverado, Ram) are automatics only. That bump marked "L8" in the top corner of the car and truck charts represents Chrysler's bet on 8-speeds as its major fuel-economy move, even in its lowest-cost models.
The hope I mentioned? You can see that the line for manuals in cars has stopped shrinking — and sure enough, buried deep within the spreadsheets of the EPA's report, lies the data that shows manual transmission cars hit bottom and have started to come back — from 311,618 in the 2011 model year to 452,232 models built in the 2013 model year. The EPA's forecast says manuals should grow again among 2014 models to 6 percent of production. It's still a small share of the market, but it shows there's a growing audience of drivers who doesn't mind having more control over their machines.
