With the advent of the electric car it is taken for granted the progressive less use of the manual gearbox, supplanted by automatic and electronic management. But knowing that certain brands are ready to say goodbye to the old system is more than a blow to the heart of tradition.
According to Auto Motor and Sport, Volkswagen will no longer produce any manual transmissions for its cars by 2030. The definitive transition to automatic will obviously be gradual, but for the new cars there will not be, not even as an option, the possibility of abandoning the third pedal. Certainly it is not just a purely technical and strategic issue: even at an economic level, the German brand will benefit from the simplification of its price lists and production lines. We will officially begin to reduce the manuals from 2023, even if in reality with the present presence of different electric the process of change was already active.
The rumors also speak of the arrival of new exclusively automatic models, albeit endothermic, like the next Tiguan scheduled for 2023. Another example in this sense could come from the Passat, the same year of release. We say Volkswagen, we also think of the others: Seat, Skoda e Audi they could act accordingly by giving them the welcome to manual gearboxes as well. The impact on the assembly line for this decision will be very important: it will be necessary to verify in the long term how much work will be lost and how much will be ‘replaced’ in this transition from manual to automatic.
The good old knob could then definitively disappear with the simplification of the dashboards: after all, why keep it when you can have a cleaner ‘automatic’ design and manual ‘temptation’ proof? Several brands have already eliminated the clutter of the manual system by opting for practical buttons or ‘switches’. The same happened also for the handbrake, now rarely visible inside the cockpit of the modern cars on the list.
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