Opinion: The long overdue death of the stick shift car

Opinion by Paul Hockenos

Berlin (CNN) — For old-school connoisseurs of the automobile — usually men — driving means operating a beloved vehicle by touch, with three pedals underfoot and a shift stick at hand.

In Europe, this clientele is responsible for a good deal of the moaning about manual transmission’s demise. And perhaps nowhere is it louder than in Germany, the home of Porsche, BMW, Volkswagen and Mercedes Benz.

Take for example the German automotive writer for the Swiss newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung who waxed melancholy in a heartfelt “homage to the good old days of the clutch and gear stick.”

“What could be a greater pleasure… than tooling along winding roads in a sports car at high speeds? Accelerate, downshift before the bend, turn in, roll, upshift again, and ‘fly away,’” he wrote.

He affectionately describes the stick shift’s smooth knob nestled in his palm. (Sigmund Freud would have had no trouble deducing the grounds for this allure.)

But it’s not just Europeans (literally) clinging on. In the US, there’s apparently a young (also predominantly male) demographic that is embracing manual driving — championing it as retro, much like Gen Z’s affinity to typewriters and vintage cameras. They feel there’s something authentic about it: a connection between driver and vehicle that automatization cuts out.

They may not know it, but both these European connoisseurs and young Americans are of a mind with Robert M. Pirsig’s protagonist in his classic 1970s philosophical novel, “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” who feels at one with his motorbike because he understands how it functions. Just pushing a button is a superficial copout.

Well, Zen or not, the day of manual transmissions is speeding to an end — and this layman is shedding no tears.

It’s not just that I cringe at the grating screech of a botched downshift, that high-pitched sequel worse than fingernails across a chalkboard. The sound upbraids and shames me for having wronged the drivetrain. But this obviously never happens to alpha men, the kind who love their engines and coax them to purr.

The superfluous clutch

Today, however, there are knockout reasons — beyond the transmission’s wellbeing — for the end of the stick shift era, and why we should applaud it, too.

For one, the oft-repeated benefits of a stick shift over an automatic have been redundant now for years.

Twentieth century wisdom was that because manuals had more gears than automatics — the latter usually just three — an adroit shifter with five on the floor could operate the engine more efficiently, and thus get more miles to the tankful.

But technology has moved on and automatics with as many as nine gears are common. And they chalk up better mileage and drive faster than their stick-shift counterparts. The explanation: automatics select the right gear for the vehicle, usually the highest gear possible. The average manual driver is not always so proficient. In getting the gear right, automatics consume less fuel, save money and emit fewer emissions.

These are among the reasons why it’s ever harder to buy a new manual-transmission model of any kind in many countries. In the US, less than 1% of new models have stick shifts (compared to 35% in 1980), according to the Environmental Protection Agency. It’s really only sports cars, off-road truck SUVs and a handful of small pickups that still have clutches.

In Europe, Volkswagen is dropping all of its manual-gearbox vehicles in order to comply with EU regulations to reduce emissions.

Gearboxes as such are out

While all gasoline-run cars and trucks are climate killers with stick shifts being the slightly worse of two evils, combustion-engine automatics themselves are on their way out. They are tooling along the highway side-by-side with their stick-and-clutch counterparts toward the junkyard of history.

Electric vehicles have gear systems, too: a single speed transmission that transmits energy from the motor to the wheels. But because only one gear exists, there is no switching of gears, neither automatically nor manually.

For the gear-shifting self-appointed connoisseurs, the EVs’ whoosh to higher speeds probably irks them even more than automatics. But fossil-fuel-burning engines of all kinds are on their way out — as a result of the climate crisis — and the sooner we’re rid of them, the better.

Road transportation accounts for 15% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, according to Our World Data, as well as being a huge contributor to the air pollution that claims around nine million deaths a year from respiratory and lung diseases. Transportation noise, though less deadly, also contributes to stress and sleep disorders.

EVs to the rescue

Thankfully, there’s a convenient way to circumvent these blights: electric vehicles.

Last year, the sales of electrics tripled over the proceeding three years, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA). It added that if the trend continues — which hinges upon the rollout of charging stations — the EV revolution will save the planet five million barrels of oil a day by 2030.

Positive surveys seem to jibe with my own and friends’ impressions of the ride one gets with the EV. It’s quiet and as smooth as crème brulee. “My husband and I actually fight over who’s going to drive the EV to work,” my friend Cristine in upstate New York told me. And my brother in San Francisco is into his fourth year of leasing an EV.

In cities like Oslo, Norway, where new EV sales are the rule rather than the exception, the air is cleaner, noise is less and overall emissions are down, too. So successful has the electric push been, Norway is ending the sale of gasoline cars in 2025.

But for those aficionados who really can’t go without a clutch and gear shifter, Toyota is planning a realistic-feeling fake manual transmission for some EV models.

It serves no purpose whatsoever — save to comfort bruised egos.

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