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The Manual Transmission Is Dead

If you’re like me, you love yourself a good old fashioned stick shift. There’s something about banging from one gear to the next that makes driving just a little more enjoyable.

However, unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve noticed that manuals are getting harder and harder to find on new car lots. There are three key reasons for this:

1. Emissions and fuel economy regulations have forced automakers to implement complicated electronic controls that are incompatible with manual transmissions.
2. Automatic transmission efficiency has dramatically improved in the last decade or so.
3. The operating costs of a modern automatic are lower than ever.

Am I glad to pronounce the death of the manual transmission? Not at all. Yet the fact is, the manual transmission is dead.

Here’s how it happened.