Where are all of the Manuals Going?

      The manual transmission was and still is a sign of sportiness, ruggedness, and fun. But is all of this fading away with the constant improvements to the automatic transmission? Maybe. A lot of ordinary enthusiast cars today are dumping the option of a stick shift for quicker shifting double-clutch automatics, sequential manual gearboxes (SMG's), and automatics, that can be manually shifted with paddles on both sides of the steering wheel. The gear lever also can be put into a sport mode/position that can be pushed up and down to change gears.

      Double-clutch automatics (DCT's)can change gears almost instantaneously as the gearbox has literally two clutches inside of the gearbox. One clutch controls the odd number gears and the other controls the even number gears. The car manufacturer that really pioneered this gearbox was initially Citroen in the late 1930s, but it was abandoned, as torque converters became popular. Later Porsche used the DCT, which they called PDK(too long to pronounce in German) in some of their race cars in the 1980s. The Volkswagen Auto Group did get ahead of the game in putting the DCT in road cars with the 2003 VW Golf R34, and the 2003 Audi TT 3.2 Quattro(Audi is part of the Volkswagen Auto Group). Today, they are used by almost every company in nearly every type of car. 

The layout of a DCL/PDK Transmission (dual-clutch-transmission.htm How Stuff Works)

      SMG's are a lot less smooth than double clutch automatics, but they are used widely on the racing scene and in motorbikes. The way they work is reasonably complicated. There is a lever just like a standard shift lever but without the H-pattern, and there can also be shift paddles to change the gears as well. To gearshift, the driver pushes up or down to go into the next or previous gear. This gearbox is quite unreliable as it is much more harsh to the materials inside of the transmission. For example, BMW put SMG's in the M3 during the mid-2000s, and some believe that the transmission ruined the whole experience of owning that car due to high maintenance and failure rate.

SMG in the e46 BMW M3

      You'd think that manual cars would be, in a way, a distinctive thing to have in a garage, but more and more people want the experience of driving a vehicle to be more relaxed rather than more exciting. Some supercars, though, are still opting to have manual gearboxes come with them, including the Pagani Zonda, Porsche 911 GT3, the Corvette ZR1, and the Noble M600. Although the enthusiast community is still alive and well there may not be enough to keep manufacturers from giving their ordinary consumer what they desire in some of the cheaper cars. Some cars that probably won't get rid of the manual would be the Mazda Miata, possibly the BMW M3 (most of the BMW lineup is going automatic, but the M3 enthusiast group is large). The manual gearbox will always be distinctive to a defined group of people, though, and that is why I think that there will always be a group of cars with manual transmissions. 

The Pagani Zonda

The Corvette ZR1