Clutch Performance? Even BMW Is Eliminating The Manual Transmission

The manual transmission isn’t dead. But it appears to be dying. Now Munich is making sure everybody knows BMW has a hand in the demise of the third pedal.

At the traditional core of BMW’s U.S. lineup, the manual transmission 7 Series disappeared three decades ago. So foreign is a manual shifter to buyers in the full-size luxury limo category, this seems entirely natural.

M models aside, the U.S. market lost BMW 5 Series manual transmission availability after the 2014 model year.

What’s next?

“Across the world, virtually all of our 3 Series models and above already have automatic transmissions,” BMW sales boss Ian Robertson tells Car And Driver.

“We will certainly see fewer and fewer manual transmissions being offered,” says Robertson.

Ultimate Driving Machine?

BMW certainly doesn’t need to be picked on. Manual shifters flew the coop at Ferrari. The Alfa Romeo Giulia Quadrifoglio that was going to arrive in the United States with a manual transmission, like the show cars that preceded its U.S. launch, is an auto-only car. Of the 38 vehicles delivered by automakers to my driveway in 2016, only 4 were fitted with a third pedal, and that ratio is actually far higher than what we see in the marketplace at large.

Nevertheless, it’s abundantly clear from Ian Robertson’s perspective that BMW, once a bastion of hope for drivers, won’t be offering manual transmissions on the 3 Series much longer.

Besides the 7 Series and 5 Series, manual transmissions are already unavailable on the X1, X3, X4, X5, and X6, five utility vehicles that account for half of the BMWs sold in America. Regular variants of the 6 Series are auto-only. The i3 and i8 are predictably auto-only.

This leaves a limited part of the range with manual offerings, and in the 3 Series — BMW’s most popular model line — the manual seems to be on the way out.

“In the M segment, purists still love the stick shift,” BMW’s Robertson told C/D. “Whether we offer it in every model remains to be seen. In some instances, it is selling in really small numbers now.”

Indeed, fewer than 300 of the roughly 10,700 BMW 3 Series in BMW’s U.S. inventory are equipped with a manual; just 2 percent. And of those cars, 75 percent are in M3s, meaning fewer than 1 percent of non-M 3 Series are manual-shift cars.

When the current F30, sixth-generation BMW 3 Series is replaced next year by the seventh-generation G20 3 Series, don’t expect anything other than an automatic transmission. A vocal minority will question BMW’s sanity, but the current 3 Series’ order books provide BMW with all the justification it requires to kill off another manual transmission.

Timothy Cain is the founder of GoodCarBadCar.net, which obsesses over the free and frequent publication of U.S. and Canadian auto sales figures. Follow on Twitter @goodcarbadcar and on Facebook.