Quote: The Mazda 6 still has a manual option, but I imagine that will be gone in a couple of years!
Whereas most automakers only supply ~8% of their US cars with Manuals, Mazda applies Manuals to anywhere between 22 and 33% of their US-bound cars, selling 3 to 4 times as many manuals as other companies. They're not about to drop them anytime soon. They just designed a new 6-Speed that should last them at least another 7 years.
The market for manuals has, overall, been holding steady in the US. However, with the number of baby-boomers and the next generation (whatever they'd be called) growing too old to use Manuals anymore, the number is beginning to decline rather rapidly. The advent of CVTs and SMGs isn't helping matters any. And Europe, which used to be the bastion of Manual Transmissions, is rapidly converting to ATX as well. As the number of buyers goes down it becomes prohibitively expensive to offer them.
Sticks will almost definitely be going away in the future as alternatives provide even better performance with less clutch problems, but I doubt it's as near as just "a couple years".
