Fewer than 3% of cars sold in the U.S. have manual transmissions
I got my driver&#x27;s license in Sweden, and the official driving handbook completely worships manual transmissions, and makes several untrue claims about how much better they are than automatics.<p>You can choose to do your road test in an automatic, but that&#x27;ll earn you a restriction on your license, barring you from driving a manual. It&#x27;s probably fair, but almost everyone (myself included) chooses to practice in manuals, and do the test in a manual to not have that restriction, which further skews the stats in favor of manuals.<p>An obligatory part of the road test is so called &quot;eco-driving&quot;, where you have to demonstrate your ability to drive efficiently, and one way of doing that is to skip a gear when shifting in certain situtations. It&#x27;s absolutely insane to force people to learn this, when automatic transmissions are consistently outperforming humans at fuel efficiency. If the traffic authorities <i>really</i> cared about fuel efficiency, they should instead sing the praises of automatic transmissions, but they don&#x27;t, because they have an irrational love of manuals.<p>And the final kicker: Road tests are done in official traffic authority cars with double controls, and I did mine in a nice, modern, manual VW Golf, that had a gear-shift indicator in the dash. And since the car is most often better than you at knowing when you should shift gears, why have the manual transmission in the first place? It&#x27;s a complete farce.<p>The silver lining is that electric cars will just decide this issue once and for all.