(fast-paced bongo beats)
- Oh, wow.
A white guy with facial hair
on a car channel loves manual transmissions.
What an original premise.
Hold on, hear me out for a minute.
I learned to drive in a 1986 Ford Taurus
that my grandpa gave me.
It had a two-tone paint job
and pretty much everything in it broke.
It even caught on fire at one point.
It had a five-speed manual and it was fun as hell.
But there's a big problem.
Manuals are going out of style.
In 1992, about 25% of car buyers
chose a manual transmission.
20 years go by and in 2012,
that number fell to just 6.8%.
In 2018, just 3.5% of buyers
drove off the lot with a manual.
As a result, car makers started offering less cars
with a manual option.
In 2012, there were about 117 new cars
you could buy with a stick shift.
It's not a lot, but not bad.
In 2018, that number fell to just 85 cars.
Still not great, but it could be worse.
And it did get worse.
In just one year, the number of cars
with a 2019 model year that you can get
with a manual is just 57.
That's a 33% drop.
If the trend continues at this rate,
manuals could be gone in two years.
People are not happy about this.
You can't go into a comment section of a video
about a new car without seeing someone say
would've been better with a manual.
(overlapping voices) Would've been better with a manual.
(whispering) No stick, no buy.
I'm gonna find you, Toyota.
I'm gonna come into your house and murder your dog.
And you know what?
I don't blame them.
Take the new Supra, the highly anticipated followup
to the legendary sports car.
The Mark IV has a six-speed
and this new one doesn't. (buzzer)
What the hell, Toyota?
Want another example?
The BMW 330i will not have a stick shift
in the US this year.
This is sacrilege
or is it?
There's a reason automakers are putting an end
to the manual transmission.
It kinda sucks.
Enter the continuously variable transmission or CVT.
They aren't like other transmissions.
They don't really have gears.
It's more of a belt drive with two pulleys.
It's kinda complicated and I'm not that smart
but the main advantages of a CVT
are super smooth acceleration
and improved fuel economy over any type of transmission.
I mean, the Williams F1 team was testing a CVT back in 1993
and that's when they were good.
Sorry, that was low.
So what would happen if an automaker
actually built a sweet car with a manual transmission today
like people have been begging for?
How 'bout a four-door sedan with a big V8,
comfy seats, undercover sleeper looks, and a six-speed?
Well, that did happen.
(funk music)
The Chevrolet SS debuted in the 2014 model year.
They took a Holden Commodore from Australia,
put some Chevy badges on it, tuned the suspension a little,
and pretty much called it good.
Critics freaking love this thing.
Comparing it other sports sedan's legends like the E39 M5,
a car that has been haunting my dreams for months.
I want one bad.
Anyway, the SS was the stuff enthusiasts
had been clamoring for.
It had magnetic ride suspension,
450 horsepower, a six-speed manual,
and, my favorite, cooled seats.
The SS was set to be an instant classic.
There's only one problem.
Nobody bought one.
Over the SS's four year production,
just 12,860 of them were sold.
Just for comparison, Chevy sold nearly
10 times as many Corvettes in the same period of time,
while Honda sold 1.4 million Civics,
and Ford sold over three million F150s.
Long story short, the SS was not a hit.
Just for fun, I went on CarMax to find an SS
and to my surprise, there were three of them for sale
but none of them had the six-speed.
I cried for half an hour.
It doesn't make financial sense for them to build these cars
if no one is gonna buy them.
That's just business.
So, why aren't people buying manuals in the US?
What makes this country different
from the rest of the world?
Besides automatics being smoother,
there has to be a good reason, right?
There are actually two.
The first is easy, convenience.
A lot of you probably daily a manual car
so you know driving stick in heavy traffic
is kind of a pain.
But if you take your car out on the weekends
and hit the canyons, then the crappy-ness
of having to deal with that is just part of the game.
But the average person just isn't like that.
They'd rather get in their car
and listen to Oprah Winfrey's Super Soul podcast
and drop me off at baseball practice.
The second reason is safety.
Now I used to think that driving stick
was the safest method because it limits distractions.
It's hard to text and drive
if you have to focus on your shifts.
I personally believe that driving manual
makes you a more focused driver.
But it turns out, that's not exactly true.
A health science study at Jonkoping University in Sweden
found that older drivers had better reaction times
and make less mistakes in cars with automatics.
When you combine that with the fact that the age group
who buys the most new cars in the US,
35-54 year olds,
it's not hard to see why people aren't buying new manuals.
Conversely, people aged 16-34
buy about half as many new cars as the older group,
if they buy a car at all.
Companies are gonna listen to who gives them money
so new automatics are pretty much better in every way.
They're more efficient, safer for old people,
and shift super fast.
But just because it's better doesn't mean the car is better.
There's something about driving stick
that makes you feel more connected to the car
than an automatic ever could.
And I'm not saying this to talk down on auto drivers.
If you have fun with your auto,
that is totally valid.
I've had a lot of fun in automatic cars.
- [Zach] So you're only saying that
because you drive an auto.
- No. (door chime)
That (bleep) Lamborghini was really fun.
But I think a good analogy for driving a manual is surfing.
I grew up about half an hour from the beach
but never learned how to surf.
But a few years ago, I actually got a lesson
and caught a few waves.
And that's when I got it.
I understood why my friends would wake up
at 4:30 in the morning to catch a swell.
You're both at the mercy of the ocean
and totally connected.
It's a truly great feeling.
That's what driving stick feels like.
If you've never learned, I definitely suggest
you get a friend or relative to each you
'cause it's the best.
So is the manual gonna die?
Maybe in new cars.
Also, electric is the future
and those cars don't need transmissions, so
meh.
But as long as gear shifters are around,
I'm sure there'll be someone there
to shift them.
If this video gets 25,000 likes in 24 hours,
I will chug a gallon of milk in an hour
on a live stream.
They say it's impossible but I don't believe them,
whoever they are.
My nickname in youth baseball was the Milk Man, okay?
I can do it.
Thanks for watching Wheel House.
Follow me on Instagram @nolanjsykes,
consider subscribing to Donut right here,
watch last week's episode of Wheel House right here,
and check out this episode ep-i-sa-do.
You know you had that one friend
that says he can drive stick.
Share this video with people
who need to learn to drive stick.
Be nice, I'll see you next time.