The 10 US States That Still Love the Manual Transmission

The take rate for manual transmission cars has gradually fallen off over the past 20 years or so.

With automatic transmissions becoming more refined and cheaper to produce, they’ve made the manual transmission nearly obsolete. Unless you’re an enthusiast that appreciates the engagement offered from rowing your own gears, it’s unlikely that you want a manual transmission. Even enthusiasts are slowly gravitating toward paddle-shifted automatic transmissions, which typically provide superior performance to manual gearboxes and can still be fun to drive with.

It’s no surprise, then, that US car retailer CarMax has experienced a sharp decline in the number of used cars it sells. In the early 1990s, over a quarter of the cars CarMax sold had a manual transmission. Today, just 3.7% of the cars it sells have three pedals. Plotting that data on a graph shows you just how quickly the manual has fallen out of favor in recent times:

There are still some US states that still love the manual transmission alive, however. CarMax also used its sales data to determine the states in which it sells the most manual transmission cars. We’re not sure why certain states may be more inclined to purchase manual cars, but the west coast seems to have a particular affinity for them.

You can view the ten states that buy more manual cars from CarMax than any other below, and feel free to let us know in the comments why you think some states seem attracted to the manual, whereas others seem to avoid them. Keep in mind that CarMax is not in all 50 US states and this is only the company’s data, so it’s not without its flaws, but we thought the results of the survey were still pretty fascinating. All of the data in this survey was compiled between August 31st, 2017 and August 31st, 2018.