![]() If we started in stick shift, you can always go to automatic from there.” Sam Phillips has driven manual transmission vehicles since he first learned how to drive. “My first car was a stick shift - everything has been afterwards. “My parents got a stick shift car for the high schoolers’ car so it’s a skill we’d always have,” Sam Phillips from American Fork said. For many college students, this is still the case. In 1995, just prior to the release of Donakey’s first car, almost 18 percent of new vehicles were manufactured with manual transmissions.ĭonakey and his seven siblings, whose high school driving years were defined by the same Dodge Dakota, represent a commonality in young people’s driving habits - many don’t learn to drive stick shifts unless their first car had a manual transmission. For a lot of younger people, this decision is in the hands of their parents.Īccording to a survey conducted by AutoTrader, in 2012, when many current college students were learning to drive, 41% of adult car shoppers said that as parents they had purchased their children’s first cars. Millennials and Gen Zers may be the last generations to have had access to stickshift vehicles when learning to drive, as manufacturing trends continue to heavily favor automatic vehicles. So we needed to learn to drive stick shift just in order to do that - to have our own car.” The Donakey family’s stick shift Dodge Dakota - which they named Dwight - served as all eight children’s first car. “It’s a stick shift, so if we wanted to be able to drive a car to school, with friends, all that stuff, that was the car that we had to drive. The sucker just keeps on running,” BYU student Barry Donakey said of his first car. For some current college students, learning to drive in a stick shift was their only option. According to Autowise, only 34 new vehicle models in 2022 were released with the option of a manual transmission.įor younger generations whose Drivers Ed days will coincide with future repercussions of minimized production, learning to drive in automatic cars could become the only feasible option. were produced with manual transmissions in 2019 - an all-time low since the early 1980s, when 34.6% of cars manufactured were stick shift. With manufacturing trends declining in strong favor of automatic cars, current college students could see stick shift cars become defunct in their lifetime.Īccording to the 2020 Environmental Protection Agency Automotive Trends Report, only 1.4% of new cars in the U.S. Twenty-something-year-olds “come in clutch” in many ways, except maybe one: being able to drive vehicles that have clutches.Īs automatic and electric vehicles, like the Tesla Model Y, continue to rise in popularity, Generations Y and Z could be the last generations to have had access to manual cars while learning to drive. Millennials may be the last generation to have had access to stick shift cars while learning to drive. Production of manual transmission vehicles has hit an all-time low since the 1980s.
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