The death of the stick shift is almost here

His father was a devoted fan of the stick shift, and so when it came time for Alvaro Puig to get his driver’s license in the early ’90s, that meant figuring out how to work the clutch and three pedals in his father’s old manual BMWs.

It wasn’t easy, but he was hooked.

“You’re making decisions about whether to shift, when to shift, when to use the clutch, putting it into gear,” Puig said.

He loved it so much that today he owns two manual BMWs of his own and avoids getting behind the wheel of his wife’s automatic Tesla. Cars with automatic transmissions are just different, he said.

“It’s kinda boring,” said Puig, 52, who lives in Kensington, Maryland.

Drivers like Puig are rare — and nearly gone. Less than 1 percent of new vehicles made for the U.S. market in 2025 were stick shifts, according to preliminary government data. At just 0.6 percent, it was an all-time low.

That’s a precipitous drop from the 34.6 percent of vehicles with manual transmissions produced in 1980.

The sharp shift away from manual has been unfolding for decades, long lamented by auto enthusiasts who cheered on hopes that the nostalgia-soaked driving experience might somehow find a new audience.

But the stick shift’s popularity hit multiple new lows in recent years, with no signs of a turnaround, thanks to new technologies and a rapidly changing marketplace.

Buyers and automakers increasingly have turned to the sophisticated automatic drivetrains that now smoothly swap gears in fractions of a second and with better fuel efficiency. The average new vehicle today comes with seven gears, thanks to computers, twice as many as in 1980 and more gears than any ordinary driver would want to shift through using a manual gearbox.

At the same time, sporty cars — the kind that buyers might demand a stick shift to drive — have fallen out of favor, replaced by interest in hulking SUVs, which are almost always automatics.

The stick shift’s demise has been hastened, too, by the rise of electric vehicles and increasingly autonomous vehicles. Neither have any need for a manual transmission.

“I think our relationship with our automobiles has changed so much,” said Ivan Drury, director of insights at auto research site Edmunds.

People don’t want to pay attention to the road, he said. They want to be on their phone.

“The more the car becomes your couch, the less you’re going to want to shift your gears,” he said.

Europe has seen a less dramatic decline in stick shifts, with manual transmissions dropping from 91 percent of car registrations in 2001 to 29 percent in 2024 among Europe’s largest auto markets, according to industry analyst JATO Dynamics.

Drury used to drive a sporty Mazda Miata with a stick shift to get around Hawaii.

“There’s no better way to spend your day if you have an open road with a manual,” he said.

But he and his wife shared the car, and the manual could be a pain to drive in traffic, so they traded in the Miata for an automatic Subaru Crosstrek.

Subaru made its name with manual cars. But the Japanese automaker stopped offering a manual Crosstrek with the 2023 model year, having already dropped that transmission from its Legacy, Outback and Forester models.

Other automakers have followed the same path.

Volkswagen announced that it plans this year to ditch its last U.S. stick-shift model, the Jetta GLI.

Toyota said this year’s GR Supra model would be its last, dropping the number of Toyota vehicles with a stick-shift option from four to three.

Honda stopped production on its manual Accord with the 2021 model, leaving the stick shift as an option on just two Civic models.

BMW has whittled down its lineup of manual cars to just four models, with one of them — the Z4 — ending production earlier this year.

It also stopped making manual vehicles under the Mini brand last year, a stunning change for a brand that once launched a major ad campaign in the early 2010s celebrating manual transmissions, with taglines like “Stick Happens” and “Get your shift together.”

Now, when the rare automaker recommits to stick shifts, it makes headlines.

Ford CEO Jim Farley reassured journalists during a visit for the Australian Formula 1 Grand Prix earlier this year that he has no plans to make the Mustang automatic-only.

“Out of our cold, dead hands will we not have a manual Mustang,” Farley said.

The Mustang is among the two dozen or so new-vehicle models still available with a stick shift.

For years, automobile fans have been worried about the fate of manuals. Car and Driver magazine launched a “Save the Manuals!” campaign in 2010, asking readers to lobby politicians and carmakers.

The tiniest bit of good news is celebrated, such as in 2023 when J.D. Power reported that 1.7 percent of car buyers opted for a manual transmission — a paltry number, but reversing years of declines.

The small pop led auto enthusiasts to compare stick shifts to vinyl records, which found sustained sales with supportive fans.

It even got Tyson Jominy excited. He’s the senior vice president at J.D. Power for automaker data and insights.

He remembers feeling newly optimistic about the stick shift’s future.

But the data quickly returned on its downward trend.

“Well, whatever promise a small uptick in manual transmission penetration gave us a few years back was false and the march toward the dustbin of history continues,“ he said this week.

He blamed it, in part, on changes in what people want from their cars.

“Americans are less fun than we used to be when viewed exclusively through car purchases,” he said.

Drivers often feel the need to be more practical about car-buying than in the past because cars are so much more expensive today, with the average new car price reaching about $50,000. And the total cost of ownership is more than $1,000 per month for a new vehicle, Jominy said.

Another problem for stick shifts is that only about 60 percent of Americans know how to drive a manual transmission, according a recent survey of 1,000 people for AmericanMuscle, an online auto parts retailer. That ranges from 83 percent for baby boomers to 39 percent for Gen Z.

Respondents were about evenly split on whether knowing how to drive a manual is an important life skill.

Puig saw the divide last year when he dropped off one of his manual BMWs with a valet. He watched from the lobby as the valet climbed into the driver’s seat, saw the stick shift and gave up. The valet placed it in neutral and just allowed the car to coast to the curb.

“It’s a dying skill,” Puig said.

But Puig wanted to pass on the tradition. He taught both of his daughters, now in their early 20s, how to drive a stick shift.

It’s such an unusual skill these days that one of his daughters wrote about the experience in her college applications.

“It was my proudest moment as a dad,” Puig said.