On the one hand, the article states that enthusiasts have been decrying the death of the manual transmission for twenty years, and on the other "it's all the fault of EVs" (which have been in mass production for only eleven years). It has fuck all to do with EVs (at least in the U. S.), except for making an appealing headline. It's why, when we bought our 2005 Scion xB, we had to order the car to get a manual transmission because they didn't keep them on the lot...because no one was buying manuals in 2004, either.

After driving a dual-clutch automatic transmission, I realized that our Scion will be the last manual transmission car we buy (mainly because the next one will be an EV, like our current first-gen Leaf, but even if we bought ICE...). Oh, I could wax nostalgic about "driver control" and "enjoying the car", but it really boils down to "old man is willing to give up performance while shaking fist at cloud". Hell, I might as well get out and crank start it, and then hop back in so I can manually advance the spark with the steering column lever. You kids don't know "control" until you have the ability to burn a hole in a piston with the flick of a lever! I don't need a computer to decide when to light the fuel/gas mixture!