That's pretty surprising to me. Where I am at least half of the cars in the street are 15-20 year old bangers that are almost all manual.

I don't doubt that if you live in particular parts of London or the South East, you could see 90% fairly new vehicles with automatic gears or EVs. (Certainly not all of London, but if you live or work in one area you're less likely to walk down residential roads in other areas.)

It's probably partly because disposable income is higher in London, but also because those with less money have better alternatives (good public transport) so don't own a car, or own one but don't use it much.

> 62.4% of new cars sold in 2021 were automatics, up from 24% in 2011 [1]

> A number of car makers offer only automatic gearboxes across their ranges, with no models from Mercedes, Genesis, Ferrari, Jaguar, Lexus, Maserati, Rolls-Royce, Subaru and Volvo being available with manual transmissions.

[1] https://www.carwow.co.uk/news/6414/automatic-gearboxes-becom...

Sorry, what I meant it's very rare to see a newish car that is manual. Old cars are manual of course. It was pretty unheard of to get an automatic new car 20 years ago.

Ah yeah, fair enough, that makes a lot of sense and I agree.

Here I feel like most of the new cars I notice are either automatic or EVs too :)

Manuals are still ubiquitous where I am in the UK so I don't agree with that assessment. They are still vastly cheaper than automatics as well.