Volkswagen has confirmed that not too many people get their sporty Golf Rs in manual.
Autoblog is on a mission to see how bad the manual transmission’s decline has gotten. They’re reaching out to every major auto manufacturer to get some hard data on what state the manual transmission is in, although we’re pretty sure that it’s been in reverse for quite some time.
A previous article reached out to Toyota and the news was freakin’ grim: just 2% of all their vehicles were sold in manual. Things got a little better when you looked at the sporty Toyota 86, which had roughly a third of drivers getting a stick shift, but the vast majority wanted an automatic transmission with flappy paddles for shifters.
Things are a little better over at Volkswagen. After gathering Volkswagen’s numbers, Autoblog found out that 44% of Golf STI and Golf R owners opted for a manual transmission. That’s way better than the Toyota 86, and so far the best we’ve seen.
For the Golf Sportswagen, which is basically the Golf station wagon, manual uptake was at a solid 28%. If we consider the pool of all Golfs sold, that drops down to 10%, and all Jettas sold are just 7% manual. For all Volkswagens sold in general, that number drops to just 5%, which is still better than Toyota.
Jalopnik confirmed that these numbers are for America only, but there’s no reason to believe that they’ll be much different in Europe or anywhere else.
We’ve got a few other numbers to share. Honda’s overall manual rate is down to 2.8%, with the bulk of those coming from the Honda Civic Type R and SI models (which have a combined 13.6% manual uptake). Subaru’s overall update is 7% for manual transmissions, with 78% of BRZ owners opting for manuals.
That’s a significant difference between Toyota and Subaru for what is essentially the same car. Guess Subaru is just seen as the more “manual” carmaker.