How much life does the Manual Transmission have?

A friend of mine blogs about Camaros over at Camaro News Blog, and normally, I avoid his stuff like the plague. He's a talented writer, and he knows and loves cars, but he's a Camaro fan (not to mention an Atlanta Braves fan!) so we don't typically see eye to eye. Earlier today, though, he showed me an article he was publishing about the demise of the Manual transmission, and I found myself engrossed. I, like him, drive a manual Mustang, and wouldn't trade my clutch-pedal for the world (or for MRC, or anything of that nature!), and I assumed that other sports car drivers agreed with me. I knew of the shift towards Manumatics that has occurred in the top-end market, but, that didn't seem like the sort of thing that would ever affect the American Pony Car way of life to me. However, he presents some interesting numbers from the executive big-wigs at GM with their Manual/Transmission sales numbers, and they paint an interesting picture. Is the manual transmission really dying? I was wont to deny it, and blame it on a less gear-headed Camaro base, but then the 65% Automatic Corvette figure jumped out at me. I'll make fun of the " 'Maro!" all day long, but I do have respect for the Corvette and view it as the only other American sports car with the pedigree and customer base to rival the Mustang in history and knowledge. That stat was what got me thinking.

I asked my neighbor's son if he knew how to drive Manual. He's 17, and, at the age where my friends and I wore our clutch-grinding abilities like a badge of honor. He told me "no". When I asked if any of his friends drove manual cars, the only one he could think of was somebody driving a 1993 300z. This kid attends an upper-middle-class high school, where I regularly see Mustangs, Camaros, BMWs, and other such vehicles (albeit, all of the 90's and early 2000's varieties) pulling out of their parking lot, and the only car he could come up with he knew of as being manual amongst his friends was an 18 year-old Nissan (We'll refrain from talking about the other 18 year-old things I see at his school, lest my girlfriend reads this post. Whoa). That painted a dim picture. So, I'll repost the CNB article below, and then ask you guys the question: What do you think of this? Is this cause for concern? If, a decade or two from now, we see the last manual cars ever being produced, will you lament their loss?

In 1964 Bob Dylan famously sang, "The times, they are a changin". Now, I don't think he was talking about cars at that point in time, but, the song seems terribly applicable when looking at the transmission shift being seen in the American vehicle market today, a shift that was made all the more apparent by the admission of Chevrolet executives that they expect more than half of the new 2012 Camaro ZL1s they sell to be purchased in the two-pedal, automatic, form. What?!

That's right: Chevrolet is producing a 580 HP, MRC Suspension, monster of a Pony Car, and they expect more people to want to buy it in Automatic than Manual. To me, this is insanity. I come from the generation of drivers who worship the clutch pedal for all of its power and potential, and who can't imagine driving a sport vehicle without one, but it seems that my generation of driver is becoming an anomaly. The current most-powerful Camaro, Chevrolet's Camaro SS of over 400HP, sells over 70% of its vehicles in Automatic, and there's reason for this.

Can you imagine driving this 580HP beast with only two pedals? Is the move from Manual to Automatic, even in the performance vehicle market of today, ultimately a good one?

Once upon a time, the only reason to go to Automatic was for the ease of it. A talented drive could shift with much less delay than automatic transmission had, and had control over their RPMs when shifting. Beyond those numbers, larger numbers of gears and more race-friendly gear ratios meant that manual vehicles were built, quiet simply, to outperform their two-pedal counterparts. Today though, advancements in technology have made the Automatic transmissions in most cars just as performance viable as manuals (and, in the case of some Ferrari/Lambo level vehicles, more efficient and race friendly than a human being can even manage). The up-tick in Automatic sales over the last many decades, based primarily on their ease of use, has also lead to an interesting phenomenon: fewer and fewer and fewer people are able to drive a stick shift, and this is a self-perpetuating trend, also, because as fewer people who can drive stick-shift exist there are fewer people with that knowledge available to teach the newer generations of automobile drivers how to handle the three-pedaled transmission. Ultimately, the Automatic transmission has killed the Manual slowly over time, and in the modern-day (where ZL1's sell more than half their vehicles in Automatic, and the base Corvette sells Automatics at a 65% tick) we live in, it looks as though we're seeing the final swan song of the stick-shift car.

Of course, and this is the hardest part of all of this for me to swallow, this isn't a bad thing. The demise of the manual means that, eventually, automobile companies wont even need to bother with the manufacturing and production of two different transmission types, and the cost of the transmission--as a component of the vehicle--will go down. Also, with the incredible advancements in technology I've seen in my lifetime, and the advent of Automatic assisted Manual transmission options--like the world-famous, Porsche derived Tiptronic and its counterparts--Automatic or Automatic Assisted Manuals (Manumatics) can actually lead to increased performance numbers. In fact, most of the world's most high-end performance cars, like the aforementioned Porsche line, utilize some form of Manumatic transmission.

Am I happy about this? No, I'm not, but I'm also a cranky old man with an extreme nostamania. Do I understand this? Absolutely.

So, what do you think? Is this shift in transmission a good thing or a bad thing? Should I, as a car enthusiast and automotive nut, lament the death of the manual transmission? Will the experience of driving, even without the involvement of the left-foot and the feel of the clutch engaging and disengaging, remain the same? What do you think? Me, I think something is lost in an Automatic, but this thinking probably has me lost in the past in the modern Automotive market.