‘Everyone wants one, but nobody buys’ – can we save the manual?
The manual gearbox is enjoying a vinyl moment as enthusiasts clamour for endangered stick-shifts
It’s a mark of how far the manual gearbox’s star has fallen in the sports car world that the Ferrari 12Cilindri Manuale and McLaren’s McL 6GT have garnered such interest simply because they’re now so rare.
Yet it also suggests there’s a hardcore of people, in a world of slick-shifting and extremely efficient automatics, who still want a manual gearbox so much that they’re prepared to pay an awful lot to have one in a high-end sports car.
But the fact remains that for most people the automatic ‘box is, these days, not just an acceptable and easy alternative but actually a better one, even in sports cars. For those who do most of their driving at conventional road speeds, it will be slicker; for extreme track drivers who only want outright performance, an automatic ‘box is faster. That only leaves a small number of enthusiasts in an ever-shrinking segment – those you could think of as driving purists, probably driving on the road, who want to shift ratios themselves.
Caterhams and Ariels and Porsche 911 GT3 Tourings or S/Cs exist for people like them (and me). Porsche talks to enough purists that it can keep a manual in production without too much persuasion. And those other niche makers only speak to purists, so they can too.
It gets muddier when broadening into other areas. Morgan, for example, offers a manual on the Plus Four, but my understanding is that even though it’s a traditional roadster, very few of them are sold as manuals. As an industry friend of mine said to me this week: “Everyone says they want one, but nobody buys one.”
In the conventional family car I wonder if it’s even more perilous. I think there’s a generational element to the manual gearbox here, too. There are those who still buy them because they perceive them as simpler to maintain, and because they’ve spent decades driving them and don’t want to swap to an automatic in later life. They will see stories about an elderly driver knocking down a wall or running over a dog because they’ve mistaken the accelerator for the brake. That’s also possible in a manual, of course, but it feels less likely.
Eventually, though, the market will be filled with those who have spent decades driving automatics. So at what point do we decide that there’s no need for separate manual and automatic driving licences? The manual test must contribute to the manual as a commercially viable product, but when there’s barely one for people to drive once they have passed, what’s the point of having it? Government wants us to stop burning fuels anyway, and there aren’t manual EVs. So surely within the next decade we bin it off, and given the backlogs at driving test centres, can we then really expect the DVSA to run additional tests or courses for manual enthusiasts? Or do we then just leave it open to those who really want to do it, in the same way that we consider towing a trailer something for the keen-beans to sort out themselves.
Anyway, if we haven’t already, perhaps at that point it’s time to accept that we really are a niche – but a very enthusiastic one.
And what if you are sufficiently enthusiastic as to want a mid-engined, limited-run, British-built sports car, but you can’t afford the million-and-a-bit cost of a McLaren? Enter the even rarer and more hand-built Noble M500.
I drove a prototype in 2022, and we had a still-unfinished one at Britain’s Best Driver’s Car in 2024. The M500 is a steel-chassis, mid-engined two-seater with a 3.5-litre Ford V6 and rear-wheel drive, mated to a six-speed Graziano gearbox like Audi used in the R8. Another two years on (things move slowly at Noble), the car is now production-ready, so there will be a full road test in the coming weeks. It’s available only with a manual and is unashamedly aimed at those who don’t want much driver assistance. The M600, its predecessor, was similar – although Noble did experiment with a single-clutch auto for a time.
If you look at the numbers of sports cars sold with manuals versus autos, you might think that Noble is wilfully ruling out 80%-plus of the potential customer base. But there are some things that just don’t go out of fashion, like the ride, handling and steering, which, for all the M500’s other foibles/characteristics (delete as appropriate), won it friends regardless of the rest of it. And now that the manual gearbox is enjoying a bit of a vinyl moment, perhaps it’s arriving at a good time.
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