Where Are All The Automatics?
Friday, 16. February 2018
Back in 2012 around a quarter of all new car registrations were autos. In 2017 that grew to 1,016,516, around 50%, so clearly there is a strong move towards autos. The reason could possibly be because we spend so long in traffic jams and nothing irritates quite so much as having to put the car in and out of gear every couple of minutes.
Spend half an hour in a traffic jam and the clutch pedal that always seemed light as a feather is now as heavy as a ton weight. Whatever the reason, the demand is increasing but the manufacturers seemed to have missed it. Whenever we have limited stock deals they tend to be mainly manuals unless the cars are executive cars, then they tend only to be autos.
This week we saw a typical example when we had a limited stock deal from VW on Tiguan petrol cars. Half were manual and half auto. That in itself was unusual because most cars of that size on special offer tend to be manuals. Within 48 hours all the autos had gone but we still had plenty of manuals (unfortunately all gone now). Crazy but proves my point.
So come on manufactures lets have access to more autos. They used to be around £30 + VAT more per month but with stronger resale values that difference has dropped to a more realistic £10 + VAT. Personally, I have driven autos for years and certainly wouldn’t go back to a manual. By Graham Hill
