Jeonsa
Well-Known Member
I mean to add to your point of the “feeling” a manual gives you, Toyota/Lexus have stated before that they try to make the auto high performance cars shift like manuals for feel. (LFA, ISF, RCF, GSF) They feel like it enhances driver engagement while benefiting from the speed of autos. Downside is you get a lot of journalist who say it doesn’t shift as fast as whatever. But I get both sides though.In general every year less people want to shift gears themselves in sports cars if annual sales figures of auto vs manual versions of the same sportscar, hot hatch and other enthusiast models are any indication. It’s an overall trend that encompasses sportscars. It just took fewer decades for automatics to become the only transmission available in non enthusiast vehicles.
I’ve said this before: the point of a manual transmission in any modern sporty car, sportscar, hot hatch, sport sedan or muscle car isn’t to “keep up” with the modern automatics and DCTs. It’s to have fun with it. Though the number of buyers who want that kind of fun dwindle each year and though emissions, fuel economy regulations and active safety features are going to kill off the few manuals still on offer in a few years some people still want them.
There are plenty of great choices among those models you mentioned. One of those “slower” 911’s with a manual transmission sounds very appealing and fun. But then again the fun factor is more important to me than the 0-60 time being slower than the one in a PDK model.
To each their own. We all like what we like. Manual offerings will be regulated out of existence before all the interested parties for them dries up. Otherwise the models you mentioned above wouldn’t be on sale today.
I see nothing wrong with the MKV Supra getting a manual transmission option for those who want it. It’s existence would take nothing away from the current 3.0 and 2.0 ZF8 models or from the GRMN edition coming later.
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