Porsche 911s Will Continue to Offer Manual Transmission—for Now

Manual transmissions are a dying technology, to the chagrin of purists, but are still around in select new cars, dependent, usually, on the “take rate,” or, put simply, sales. Porsche still offers a manual transmission option in the 911 Carrera T and the 911 GT3, for example, and it sounds like they’d like to keep manual transmissions around for years to come, if not decades, according to a new interview.

Interestingly, manual sales vary widely between the U.S. and Europe, with the latter ordering the transmissions in the single-digit percentages but Americans nearly preferring them. This leaves Porsche with some math to do, and, indeed, it sounds like, without the American market, Porsche 911 manuals might already have been gone.

“We look at the market closely and in Europe last time, we saw 2 maybe 3 percent ordered a manual in the Carrera line,” Michael Rösler, Porsche’s 911 line director, told Evo. “That gets us to some problems with our suppliers because they need to supply a certain number of parts. The U.S. is a completely different story. The past GTS had about 50 percent of customers ordering a manual. For Porsche, in the U.S. and Britain, manuals are a very interesting market. We watch it closely, it’s why we did the Carrera T manual—it was one of my early decisions to do the Carrera T. We wanted to make it sharper, we looked at the cable setup from the GT3, to lower it a bit. I think the precision with the three gates makes a difference. We are thinking about all the possibilities to get the customers a manual.”

A more difficult problem is trying to put a manual in a hybrid car like the new 911 Turbo, and that’s a problem that Porsche isn’t even trying to solve. Other automakers have experimented with making a “manual” all-electric car, with varying degrees of success.

What seems certain is that a 911 manual of some sort will likely live on for years, if perhaps only in special-edition versions. And perhaps only region-specific, like in California, where, for a certain kind of person, a 911 convertible is part of their daily uniform.

“You have to listen to customers and not be wedded to conventional engineering traditions in your mind,” Rösler said. “People love to hear the sound of the engine with the roof down—it’s fun so it makes sense. Those Californian customers are asking for more [manual convertibles] so let’s see what the future holds.”

So, get a manual 911 while you still can if you are so inclined, though you probably have more time than you think. The 911 will also likely be one of the last manual holdouts, since the gearbox is so tied to the model’s history and identity. After that, all bets are off.

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