While lots of purists will cry foul when new performance models are launched with a faster, a lot more efficient automobile box in place of a manual shift, a lot of car buyers don’t seem to mind at all.
Crawling over the current data from the society of motor makers and Traders, we discovered that back in 2012, 506,720 cars were registered with automatic gearboxes (be that standard autos, CVTs or semi-automatics). five years on and the stats for autos in 2017 have a lot more than doubled to 1,016,516.
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• manual vs automatic gearboxes – which must you choose?
Sure, over that time, registrations rose, too. but at that rate, it won’t be too long before the sales of autos overtake those of manual cars. especially as we see a rapid increase in the popularity of hybrid and fully electric cars – all of which are automatics.
All that has prompted a dispute in the Fowler household that, currently, has two 17-year old lads learning to drive. They’re learning in a manual, of course, and just about pertaining to terms with hold control. and as I remember myself, it’s probably the most tough part of learning, before you get on to the a lot more crucial aspects of becoming a driver.
So must they have just accepted that, eventually, a lot of people will just be driving automatics and aimed at an auto-only test pass? would they have less fun if they wanted to attend a track day? Well, I wouldn’t say the McLaren 570GT I ran last year with a seven-speed dual-clutch automobile was boring…
One of my lads’ friends, having just passed his test, has gone straight into a cheap, small automatic car. His reasoning was that he’ll have a black box in his car monitoring his driving, so if he didn’t have to worry about changing gear and balancing the clutch, he could just concentrate on being a better driver. smart guy. the current autos are efficient, kicking back and can still make driving fun. and that’s why I’m a big fan.
Now read about the best automatic cars on sale in 2018…