I guess us stick shift drivers are dying breed.
In the U.S, they've never not been. Though sales of manuals are actually going up in the U.S. at the moment, albeit on lower-end cars.
On high-end cars it's perfectly understandable though. Firstly, if you've got a car crammed to the eyeballs with technology then operating a mechanical stick in the middle of the car in order to move along is a bit archaic. The fact that most autos are now pretty damn good makes the good ol' stick shift look even more old-hat.
The other thing is that it makes these hugely quick modern cars a lot easier to drive. Cars in the old days weren't less powerful solely because they didn't have the technology (they were getting 1,200bhp out of 1.5-litre turbocharged F1 cars back in the 1980s - engineers knew how to do power!), they were less powerful because with no traction control, ABS, lightning-quick auto transmissions and all the rest they'd have been impossible to drive.
The same applies today really. When I was a kid I idolised the Ferrari F40, as probably many people my age did when they were kids. It was the absolute pinnacle of cars, and it had 471bhp.
A few months back, I drove not one, but
three Jaguars that had more power. I
never saw that coming when I was a kid. One had
80bhp more. And despite this, they were ludicrously easy to drive, and pretty easy to drive quickly too. In the space of 20 years you can buy a car with significantly more power than the fastest car of the 1980s, that's easier to drive than a shopping car of the 1980s.
But if you took away the stability control, traction control, ABS, brakeforce distribution, and gave them a regular manual gearbox with a hefty clutch to operate, I bet they'd be a damn sight harder to drive. And probably a lot less enjoyable as a result.
The same thing now applies to stuff like the next NSX - while I'm sure there are one or two people out there who'd like it with a manual gearbox, the vast majority of buyers will be perfectly happy with whatever they give it. And frankly, it'll probably be a better car than it ever would with a manual.
I guess what I'm saying is that not having a stick shift isn't really something to moan about. And it may even be something to celebrate.