According to numerous rumors in the automobile media, Toyota still considers adding a manual transmission option for its latest Supra model.

Three years ago, at the Geneva auto show Toyota Motor unveiled its hybrid Lexus LC500H model. At first sight, there is nothing special about this grand tourer, but when you take a look at the powertrain specification, you may be surprised by its unique and innovative transmission setup.

In the second half of the 90s, marketing specialists of Toyota noticed that automated (or robotic) manual gearboxes gave been gaining popularity in Europe. Thus, the company decided to develop its own robotic gearboxes FreeTronic and Multimode, which are considered by many experts and car enthusiasts to be far from the most successful Toyota designs.

In this article, we will discuss technical solutions, designed by Allison in the course of its long and highly-productive history, intended to attain higher manufacturing capacity, simplify the course of production with fewer components and to achieve higher level of maintainability.

In recent years, the whole automobile industry has been full of talks about an imminent end of manual transmissions. And this trend is proved by low take rates of manual models not only in the segment of traditional passenger cars, such as Toyota 86, but also in the segment of luxury cars, such as Genesis.

Hewland Engineering Limited is the only company in the world that supplies transmission solutions to racing teams at virtually all levels of motorsports. Transmissions of this British company are distinguished by high quality components and high-tech production process. In this article, we will become more familiar with this company and take a closer look at its racing transmission technologies.

We continue analyzing statistics on sales figures of manual models from car manufacturers who still put hopes on manual transmissions. Now it’s VW’s turn to tell us how many admirers of the German carmaker still prefer to use gear sticks. The positions of manual models in the VW product line are still quite strong, at least when compared to the data from other automakers.

If you've ever considered Porsche models as an option when buying a car, you must have come across an unusual abbreviation PDK, when examining Porsche’s specifications. This advanced transmission solution, built in-house, ensures extremely fast gear shifting and found application in numerous Porsche models for a good reason.

Modern auto industry is full of sophisticated drivetrain technologies which are supposed to make your driving experience even more pleasant and trouble-free. Despite a great abundance of sophisticated technical solutions, it is highly likely that very few people know a transmission solution operating like a manual CVT.

Manual transmissions make another step backward in the competition with automatics, as Mini reported about temporary suspension of its models equipped with manual gearboxes for the territory of the USA.

Ford plans to approach the auto market with 40 models (16 of them are supposed to be battery-operated) of electrified cars by 2022. For this purpose, Ford came up with the idea to design an advanced automatic transmission system, named as “modular hybrid technology”.

New cars equipped with manual transmissions become more and more economically unjustified areas of expenditures, since annual sales figures for manuals lag significantly behind automatics and major automakers, such as Toyota, start having doubts about the competitiveness of manuals vs. automatics. However, Mazda's Miata still shows a decent sales statistcs.

As new car models are equipped with more and more advanced electronics, carmakers find new ways to add more free space in the driver’s cabin. The new digital push-button gear shifting mechanism in the upgraded 2020 Acadia is a vivid example of this trend.

Several years ago, Dan Dorsch, a MIT student-inventor, developed the concept of a unique transmission, which may soon compete with the most technologically advanced transmissions.

Toyota representative Nancy Hubbell unveiled some curious figures related to sales of manual Toyota models, giving some insights on prospects of gear-sticks in the future of the automobile industry.