Blogging From A to Z Day 13: M is for Manual Transmission

As you can see, my manual transmission indoctrination started early.

For the month of April I will be participating in the Blogging From A to Z Challenge. Learn more about the challenge by clicking here. Each day (except Sundays) I will be posting a theme based on each letter of the alphabet. This blog is covering automotive topics for the month. To read my other blog posts for the challenge, click here. 

In case you haven't noticed, manual transmissions are dying in the U.S. automotive market. Apparently automakers feel that Americans don't want to manually shift gears in their car, favoring that the car's ECU decides when gear changes are made. There are even a number of performance vehicles that are offered with an automatic transmission as an option, when no such option was available before, like the upcoming 2015 Chevrolet Corvette ZO6. Other performance cars can only be had with an automatic transmission, like the Dodge Challenger or Porsche 911 GT3.

Why Are Manuals Dying? Is it Because of Software Difficulties?

I ran across this interesting article on Jalopnik, which starts off trying to make the case that manual transmissions are dying because they do not behave well with software used in cars' various systems. Read the article by clicking here if you want to see all the nitty gritty details.