In 2019, 51 percent of new passenger cars sold in our country were equipped with an automatic transmission, the Bovag reports. The figures thus support the suspicion that the manual transmission has also had its day in Europe.
The share of the machine is also increasing rapidly. According to the Bovag, in the first three quarters of 2020, 53 percent of the cars were already equipped with an automatic transmission. In comparison: ten years ago no less than eighty percent of the cars sold in our country are manual.
Now the car trend isn’t entirely a buyer’s preference. The role of the supply and the addition situation is probably a lot bigger, whereby the keyword is of course electrification. In 2010, the Volkswagen Polo was still the most popular model, largely thanks to the tax-friendly and always manual Blue Motion variant. In places two and three were the Peugeot 107 and Toyota Aygo, A-segmenters that are almost always equipped with three pedals.
In 2019 the situation looked very different. Then the Tesla Model 3 became the most popular car in our country with an unprecedented lead, and of course this EV always falls into the ‘automatic’ category. EVs also play a major role this year. The number 1 position is so far for the Kia Niro, another model that is not available with a manual gearbox.
Of course, it is also the case that more and more petrol models are equipped with an automatic transmission. A modern machine often yields a more favorable CO2 figure and with the increase in the number of traffic jams (for corona, then) more and more people know how to appreciate the machine. Last year 36 percent of the petrol cars delivered received an automatic transmission, with diesels that was about 60 percent.
De Bovag bases its conclusions on statistics in its own publication ‘Mobility in Figures’. Lovers of interesting statistics about the Dutch fleet should the online version of that document be sure to dig through.