[{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org\/","@type":"BlogPosting","@id":"https:\/\/smart-motoring.com\/opinion\/manual-gearbox-making-comeback\/#BlogPosting","mainEntityOfPage":"https:\/\/smart-motoring.com\/opinion\/manual-gearbox-making-comeback\/","headline":"The Manual Gearbox Is Making a Comeback","name":"The Manual Gearbox Is Making a Comeback","description":"For years we were told the manual gearbox was dying. The data says otherwise. Around 90 per cent of Subaru BRZ buyers and half of all US BMW M2 buyers now choose three pedals, manual specials sell out instantly, and even Bugatti and Ferrari are bringing the stick shift back. We look at why the manual is quietly staging a comeback, just as EVs start faking the very thing these buyers are paying to keep.","datePublished":"2026-09-05","dateModified":"2026-09-05","author":{"@type":"Person","@id":"https:\/\/smart-motoring.com\/author\/max-wheeler\/#Person","name":"Max Wheeler","url":"https:\/\/smart-motoring.com\/author\/max-wheeler\/","identifier":37,"image":{"@type":"ImageObject","@id":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/dd7d05981c650a54552c318b1741510fc7d8850afe8d276012b8833bf2eda46d?s=96&d=mm&r=g","url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/dd7d05981c650a54552c318b1741510fc7d8850afe8d276012b8833bf2eda46d?s=96&d=mm&r=g","height":96,"width":96}},"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Smart Motoring","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","@id":"https:\/\/smart-motoring.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/10\/smart-motoring_news_logo_g-e1765846726493.webp","url":"https:\/\/smart-motoring.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/10\/smart-motoring_news_logo_g-e1765846726493.webp","width":600,"height":60}},"image":{"@type":"ImageObject","@id":"https:\/\/smart-motoring.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/hand-on-a-manual-transmission-gear-shift-knob.jpg","url":"https:\/\/smart-motoring.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/hand-on-a-manual-transmission-gear-shift-knob.jpg","height":1010,"width":1920},"url":"https:\/\/smart-motoring.com\/opinion\/manual-gearbox-making-comeback\/","about":["ELECTRIC CARS","LATEST CAR NEWS","OPINION"],"wordCount":2125,"articleBody":"\/* Scoped styling I like writing in html!*\/.sm-article{max-width:820px;margin:0 auto;font-size:1.05rem;line-height:1.7;color:#1a1a1a;}.sm-article h1{font-size:2.1rem;line-height:1.2;color:#2d8c0d;margin:0 0 .3em;}.sm-article h2{font-size:1.6rem;color:#2d8c0d;margin:1.6em 0 .5em;}.sm-article h3{font-size:1.3rem;color:#2d8c0d;margin:1.5em 0 .4em;}.sm-article h4{font-size:1.1rem;color:#1a1a1a;margin:1.2em 0 .3em;}.sm-article p{margin:0 0 1.1em;}.sm-byline{color:#666;font-size:.95rem;margin:.2em 0 1.4em;}.sm-byline strong{color:#2d8c0d;}.sm-figure{margin:1.6em 0;}.sm-figure img{width:100%;height:auto;border-radius:8px;display:block;}.sm-figure figcaption{font-size:.9rem;color:#666;font-style:italic;text-align:center;margin-top:.5em;}.sm-toc{background:#f6f8f4;border:1px solid #dbe7d3;border-radius:10px;padding:20px 24px;margin:1.6em 0;}.sm-toc h2{font-size:1.15rem;margin:0 0 .5em;color:#1a1a1a;}.sm-toc ul{margin:0;padding-left:1.1em;}.sm-toc li{margin:.25em 0;}.sm-toc a{color:#2d8c0d;text-decoration:none;}.sm-toc a:hover{text-decoration:underline;}.sm-intro{border-left:5px solid #2d8c0d;padding:.4em 0 .4em 18px;font-size:1.15rem;font-style:italic;color:#1a1a1a;margin:1.4em 0;}.sm-callout{background:#eef6e9;border-left:5px solid #2d8c0d;border-radius:0 8px 8px 0;padding:16px 20px;font-style:italic;margin:1.6em 0;}.sm-callout a{color:#2d8c0d;font-weight:600;}.sm-faq h3{font-size:1.2rem;margin-top:1.3em;}    The Manual Gearbox Is Making a Comeback  By Max Wheeler  |  Opinion             Written off for a decade, the manual gearbox is quietly staging a comeback, and the sales data is the surprising part           The Manual Gearbox Comeback: What the Data Shows          The numbers nobody expected      Sold out before the ink dried      Even the hypercars have rediscovered the clutch      The fake gearbox and the real one      Why we suddenly want to work for it      Which cars still come with a manual      Frequently asked questions           The manual gearbox is making a comeback, and I say that as someone who spent most of the last decade being told the exact opposite. The automatics got quicker, the dual-clutches got cleverer, the electric cars did away with gears altogether, and the third pedal came to feel like a fax machine bolted to the floor. So it is with some delight, and a little suspicion, that I report the stick shift has been quietly refusing to die. People are actively, measurably choosing to row their own gears again, sometimes in numbers that have made the manufacturers themselves sit up.   How the stick shift stopped dying and started selling  The received wisdom goes like this: manual cars are slower, less efficient, harder to sell, and doomed by a combination of electrification and simple convenience. Every part of that is broadly true, and none of it has stopped a surprising number of people from ticking the box marked three pedals. What has changed is not the physics. It is us. And once you see the pattern, you cannot unsee it, because the revival of the manual transmission is showing up everywhere from cheap sports cars to eight-figure hypercars at the same time.   The numbers nobody expected  Start with the hard data, because it is genuinely startling. Every year the industry quietly discloses how many buyers of each still-available stick-shift car actually chose the manual, and the 2025 to 2026 figures do not describe a dying technology. They describe a devoted one. On the Subaru BRZ, around 90 per cent of buyers take the manual gearbox. On the WRX it is about 85 per cent. Toyota’s GR Corolla sits near 71 per cent, the Mazda MX-5 around 60, and the Cadillac CT4-V Blackwing, a 472-horsepower luxury saloon that comes with a superb automatic, still sees roughly 60 per cent of buyers row their own gears.  Then there is the number that actually stopped me. Half of every BMW M2 sold in the United States leaves with a manual gearbox. Half. This is a modern performance coupe available with a faster, cleverer eight-speed automatic, and one buyer in two looks at that and says no thank you, I would like to do it myself. BMW’s own M division boss called demand enormous. When a company that could sell you the easy option reports that half its customers are choosing the hard one, something in the culture has shifted.           Where a manual is still offered, take-up is often high and, in several cases, rising. The BMW M2 figure in particular has caught the industry off guard     Sold out before the ink dried  If take rates measure quiet devotion, the special editions measure something closer to hunger. When BMW decided to build a limited manual-only version of the M3, the M3 CS Handschalter for the American market, it sold out almost immediately. Not steadily, not respectably, but the automotive equivalent of a stampede. The pattern repeats across the industry: put out a deliberately purist, manual-only, driver-focused special, and the order book fills before the marketing department has finished its coffee.  There is a bittersweet reading of this, and I think it is the honest one. Some of that urgency is not joy, it is fear. Buyers have worked out that the manual gearbox is being quietly withdrawn, that the next generation of many of these cars may not offer it at all, and they are buying now while they still can. BMW has as much as admitted the next M3 may go automatic-only, and that its first hybrid M-car will not offer a clutch pedal. So part of this comeback is a farewell tour, people queuing to own the last of something before the door shuts. That does not make the demand less real. If anything it makes it more poignant.           Half of all BMW M2s sold in the US are ordered with the six-speed manual over the quicker automatic, a figure that surprised even BMW. Image: press.bmwgroup     Even the hypercars have rediscovered the clutch  Here is where the story stops being about affordable sports cars and starts being about something stranger. At the very top of the market, where cars cost more than houses and every rival has long since gone paddle-shift, the manual is being deliberately, expensively reintroduced. Pagani builds the Utopia with a proper gated manual, and around three-quarters of buyers choose it over the automatic. Ferrari, having abandoned the manual years ago, has brought back a gated six-speed shifter on the 12Cilindri Manuale. And Bugatti, whose CEO Mate Rimac was asked at Monterey whether a stick shift might ever return, replied without hesitation: imagine a V16 with a manual, a real manual.  That word, real, is doing an enormous amount of work, and it is where this whole story sharpens into a point. Ferrari’s revived manual is what it calls Manuale By-Wire: a clutch pedal with no physical connection to anything, an angle sensor telling the software to simulate the effect of a clutch. It is, in the most literal sense, a fake manual with a real lever. Bugatti’s Rimac, by contrast, is insisting on the genuine mechanical article, and in the same breath his engineers have refused to pipe any synthetic engine noise through the Tourbillon’s speakers, tuning its 9,000rpm V16 to sound wild the honest way. At the summit of the car world, two philosophies are now openly at war: simulate the sensation, or engineer the real thing. That the argument has reached Bugatti and Ferrari at all tells you how alive it suddenly is.     Related reading: this is the flip side of a story we covered recently, the rise of the fake gearbox in electric cars, where Hyundai, Toyota and even Porsche now simulate the feel of shifting that these buyers are paying real money to keep.   The fake gearbox and the real one  It is worth sitting with the strangeness of this moment, because two opposite things are happening at once and they are clearly connected. On one side, electric performance cars are being fitted with elaborate simulated gearboxes, fake shifts, fake revs, fake redlines, precisely because their makers have realised that drivers miss the involvement a real gearbox provided. On the other side, the buyers of petrol cars are voting with their wallets to keep the genuine mechanical version alive for as long as physically possible.  These are not two trends. They are one trend, seen from both ends. Everybody, it turns out, has quietly agreed that the act of changing gear yourself is worth preserving. The only disagreement is about method. The EV makers, having no gears to offer, build a convincing impression of the experience. The stick-shift purists, still able to buy the real thing, are stockpiling it before it disappears. Both camps are chasing the same ghost. One is painting a very good portrait of it, the other is trying to keep the body warm.   Why we suddenly want to work for it  The obvious question is why, and I do not think the answer is really about performance, because on that measure the manual lost years ago. A good dual-clutch will out-shift the fastest human hand and never miss a gear on a cold morning. No, the appeal is precisely that a manual is harder, and that the difficulty is the pleasure. Every gearchange is a small act of skill you can do well or badly. Heel-and-toe on a downshift, catch the bite point cleanly on a hill, nail a smooth change in the wet, and you feel briefly, absurdly competent. That feeling has no substitute, and it turns out a lot of us were quietly missing it.  There is a decent argument that as cars have become more automated, more assisted and more screen-bound, the manual gearbox has become a kind of refuge, one of the last places in a modern car where the human is unambiguously in charge and can unambiguously get it wrong. In an age of lane-keeping nannies and self-parking and, now, cars that drive themselves across London, choosing to operate a clutch by hand is almost a political act. It says: I am still doing this. That, more than any performance figure, is what I think the numbers are really measuring. Not nostalgia, but a wish to stay involved.   Which cars still come with a manual  If all this has you reaching for your keys, the practical news is mixed. You can still buy a genuinely wide spread of manual cars in 2026, but the list shrinks every year, and some of the best are already on borrowed time. Among the affordable, the Mazda MX-5, Subaru BRZ and Toyota GR86 twins, Toyota GR Corolla and GR Supra, Honda Civic Type R and the Ford Mustang all still offer three pedals. Further up, Porsche keeps the manual alive in the 911 in specific trims such as the GT3 Touring and the Carrera T, and in the 718 for as long as that car lasts.           Porsche keeps the manual alive in the 911 in cars like the GT3 Touring, where 83 per cent of buyers choose to shift for themselves. Image: Porsche Newsroom     Then there are the specials worth moving quickly for, because they are the ones most likely to vanish or sell out: the BMW M2 and the manual M3 and M4, the Cadillac Blackwings, and the increasingly precious purist editions. My advice, for whatever a columnist’s advice is worth, is simple. If you have ever fancied owning a manual performance car, this is not the moment to keep waiting for the perfect time. The perfect time was a few years ago. The second-best time is now, while the box you want to tick is still on the order form.         Frequently asked questions     Is the manual gearbox making a comeback?    In demand terms, yes. Where carmakers still offer a manual, take-up is often high and in several cases rising: around 90 per cent of Subaru BRZ buyers, 83 per cent of Porsche 911 GT3 Touring buyers and 50 per cent of US BMW M2 buyers choose the stick shift. Overall availability is still shrinking, but appetite for the manual transmission is clearly strong, which is why several makers are launching new manual specials.     What percentage of BMW M2 buyers choose the manual?    About half. BMW M has said roughly 50 per cent of BMW M2s sold in the United States are ordered with the six-speed manual rather than the quicker eight-speed automatic, a figure high enough that it influenced BMW’s decision to build a manual-only M3 CS.     Are hypercars bringing back the manual gearbox?    Some are. Pagani offers a gated manual in the Utopia, chosen by around three quarters of buyers, Ferrari has revived a gated six-speed on the 12Cilindri Manuale, and Bugatti’s CEO has said he wants a real manual for the Tourbillon’s V16. It is a notable reversal at the top of the market, where automatics had become universal.     Why are manual cars becoming popular again?    Mainly for driver engagement. A manual is slower and less convenient than a modern automatic, but many enthusiasts value the skill and involvement it demands. As cars become more automated and electric, the stick shift has become a way to stay hands-on, and some buyers are also purchasing now because they fear the manual gearbox will soon be withdrawn.     Which new cars can you still buy with a manual in 2026?    A shrinking but still varied list, including the Mazda MX-5, Subaru BRZ and Toyota GR86, Toyota GR Corolla and GR Supra, Honda Civic Type R, Ford Mustang, and the Porsche 911 and 718 in specific trims. Performance specials such as the BMW M2, manual M3 and M4, and the Cadillac Blackwings also offer one, though availability varies by market and trim.     Is a manual gearbox faster than an automatic?    No. A modern dual-clutch or performance automatic shifts faster and more consistently than any human, so it is usually quicker around a track. The manual’s appeal is not speed but involvement and control, which is exactly why the buyers who choose it tend to do so deliberately.     Data graphic: Smart Motoring. Vehicle images: press.bmwgroup and Porsche Newsroom. Take-rate figures are US-market manufacturer disclosures compiled by the motoring press for 2025 to 2026 and vary by trim and region. 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