Nowadays with Toyota's HSD effectively getting rid of a transmission to rely on the electric motors in order to emulate a CVT, and European regulations now favoring hybrids, it won't surprise me if in the next 10 years most of the new cars sold in Europe get rid of the manuals.
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Originally Posted by jcp123
Americans are lazy about driving. Lack of blinkers during lane changes, high beams at night, crappy lane discipline - for a car culture, we actually care almost zero about driving. So of course automatics, which take another driving burden off, are popular as hell here.
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It's not only a matter of lazyness. Driving a manual during rush hour can be quite painful. I have runner knees, and my father tended to complain that I didn't want to drive his car which has a manual transmission. I haven't driven for a while, and even considered some hand controls adaptation.
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Manuals are dying off in big trucks too. The automated manuals are taking a big portion of the market. My company has a large national fleet and has only bought automated manuals for a few years now - I’d be surprised if there’s more than a few dozen actual manual trucks left in our fleet - but trucks get some advantages from an auto which cars really don’t, so it’s a bit of a different situation.
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Even though an AMT is not exactly the same as a proper automatic, at least for road usage it's more beneficial, while city traffic and even some off-road conditions would be more suitable for an automatic. On a sidenote, when the need to replace some American fire engines imported in the '90s arose in São Paulo, Volkswagen fitted conventional automatic transmissions to some trucks.
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I am almost sure that at 35, I am the youngest person to know how to drive a manual trans in my family - including in-laws, which is a really huge family, lol. I laughed my ass off when my nieces, the oldest of which was maybe 10 or 12, was awed by window cranks in our Kia.
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I'm 30 and have actually been favorable to automatics for a while. My first contact with someone who drove automatics on a regular basis happened when I was 12 and moved to a condominium after my father got discharged from Brazilian Air Force, and the neighbor next door had an automatic Volkswagen Quantum.