Sales of Luxury Manual Cars from Genesis are Not Good Enough

In recent years, the whole automobile industry has been full of talks about an imminent end of manual gearboxes. Nowadays even Europe, known as a harbor of manuals, starts shifting to more sophisticated and comfortable automatic solutions, let alone the US market. Despite this strong automation trend, there are still dedicated fans of cars with a gear stick, but taking into account the sales statistics on manual models, nobody can say really for how long.

Automobile media sources have been recently chasing car manufacturers, who still have faith in manual gearboxes, to find out the prospects of manuals on the auto market. And it turned out that major carmakers, with some exceptions, have serious problems with selling its manual models. For example, the manual Toyota 86, which was actually designed to be manual, attracted only 33% of buyers, while others opted for the more expensive automatic version. In this article, we will shift to the luxury segment and learn more about sales of Genesis manual models.

Genesis G70 sedan equipped with a 6-speed manual transmission

For the 2019 model year, the Genesis G70 sedan is offered with a 6-speed manual coupled with a 2.0-liter engine. With the manual, the G70 takes 6.6 seconds to reach 60 mph, which is not bad, but is not super impressive either. In the recent interview, one of Genesis representatives said that the G70 manual sales from the start of the years reached only 4%. No doubt that it is not the figure that was expected by the Korean automaker when the launching this manual model in production. Moreover, this figure is calculated without taking into account the G70's 3.3L sales, available only with the automatic, otherwise the figure for manual sales would have been even lower.

It can be argued that some Genesis buyers expected the more powerful 3.3-liter model to be equipped with the manual gearbox and it can be partially the case, but it's not fair to criticize Genesis for offering a manual on only one engine when just 4% of 2.0T customers are opting for it. We can conclude that no matter whether it is a designed to be manual Toyota 86 or a luxury car, the customer demand is the main incentive that can force automakers to stick with manuals. Otherwise, car models equipped with a manual gearbox may soon become museum showpieces.