Foreword
With the rapid development of automotive technology, manual transmission cars seem to be gradually forgotten by the times. Its sales have been declining year by year, and its market share has been continuously eroded by automatic transmission models. Behind this change, is it the inevitability of technological progress, or the change in consumer demand? Is it true that manual transmission cars are no longer able to meet the needs of modern life? Let's work together on the causes and effects of this phenomenon.
Automatic transmission compensatesDisadvantages of manual transmission
First of all, automatic transmission models are becoming more and more popular. Nowadays, with the continuous improvement of domestic automobile production capacity and the large-scale production of self-owned brand CVT DCT gears, the first automatic transmission car can be said to be the price of cabbage compared with before. Not only the self-owned brand, but also the automatic transmission compact car of the joint venture brand is now priced at only 60,000 to 70,000 yuan. No longer an obstacle for consumers to choose an automatic transmission.
The domestic traffic environment is becoming more and more unfriendly to manual transmissions. Anyone who has studied for a driver's license knows that manual transmission vehicles must use the clutch and gear lever when starting and shifting gears, and there is also the fear of being dominated by stagnation and stuttering. Manual transmission vehicles operate much more intensively in traffic jams than in quiet traffic conditions, and also much more intensively than automatic transmission vehicles.
Moreover, with the rapid development of second- and third-tier cities, traffic congestion is no longer the preserve of first-tier cities. If there is a traffic jam on the elevated ramp, such a traffic environment is not suitable for the survival of manual transmission models, and consumers are not willing to choose manual transmission models.
Manual transmissions are increasingly unable to adapt to today's technological developments. In the early years, the types and technologies of automatic transmissions were not as good as they are today, and at that time, manual transmissions had an advantage in terms of fuel consumption due to the fact that automatic transmissions had fewer gears and the transmission efficiency of torque converters was lower.
However, with the increasing gears of automatic transmissions in recent years, as well as the increasing popularity of dual-clutch and CVT transmissions, the disadvantages of automatic transmissions in terms of fuel consumption are already small compared to manual transmissions, and there are even very good automatic transmissions, fuel consumption is also relatively good, as for performance, it can perform better than manual transmissions.
In addition, in official fuel consumption tests (such as the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology), the shift time of manual transmission models is determined on a per-cycle basis, which is not necessarily the most economical optimal shift time. This also led to the emergence of manual transmission models. There is no advantage in the official fuel consumption test, and as fuel consumption regulations become more and more stringent, the living space of manual transmission models has been squeezed to a certain extent.
If you can survive for a while with a manual transmission on a petrol car, you really can't survive with a manual transmission on a hybrid. Since hybrid vehicles involve power switching or coupling between multiple energy sources, specific control strategies must be implemented by controllers such as ECU HCUs, so the power and transmission systems of hybrid vehicles must be automatically controlled.
A manual transmission simply does not meet the demand. In another scenario, where manual transmission is not sufficient, automatic steering assist. Whether it's Level 1 ACC adaptive cruise control or fully autonomous final steering, the vehicle must be able to control its speed automatically. In this case, it must be an automatic transmission car or a new energy vehicle to meet the requirements of automatic steering assistance function, and manual transmission is again discriminated again.
For car owners who are willing to opt for manual transmissions, there are fewer and fewer models with high-quality manual transmissions. While most consumers may not like manual transmission cars, there are still some enthusiasts who know how to drive and are willing to choose manual transmission cars. For this group of consumers, they also have a certain pursuit of power and handling, so they don't like the usual A-class manual transmission cars, this group of consumers want a high-quality manual transmission model.
However, these models are becoming increasingly rare. For example, the Porsche Cayman Boxster no longer has a manual transmission model after the 2008 09 model year, the BMW 3 Series has been discontinued since the 2015 model year, and the Golf has also discontinued the manual transmission model since 2015. The 2019 model year manual transmission model can be said to be the majority of performance-related models in the Chinese market has slowly abandoned the manual transmission.
Conclusion
In recent years, as car companies have become more and more difficult, car companies have become more and more reluctant to develop products specifically for a small number of consumers. Even if some people still like it, the smaller and smaller manual transmission models are still the more popular optimization objects. On the one hand, the automatic transmission is getting more and more powerful, and on the other hand, the manual transmission is becoming more and more difficult to drive, and these two factors are combined, and the manual transmission naturally loses.