Good job, guys. In 2018, 44% of new GTI and Golf R buyers chose to take home a manual.

Now, fewer than half of all performance variant buyers may not seem like a huge accomplishment but considered against the rest of the industry, it’s shockingly high.

Consider that just a third of all Toyota 86 buyers picked a third pedal, just 15% of Corolla hatch buyers made for the manual, and just 13% of all Civic buyers selected the stick.

Granted, the Civic numbers include all Civics because the Si and Type R are manual only, but it’s not like the Golf buyer’s love of gear selection is limited to performance variants.

Buyers of the Sportwagen were also fans of shifting for themselves. A full 28% of the wagon’s customers took on the trans.

Numbers for the brand as a whole sink from there, though. It shouldn’t come as a surprise since the no-manual Atlas and Tiguan are two of VW’s biggest sellers these days. Add to that the fact that the brand’s other big seller, the Jetta, only has a 7% manual take rate and VW’s overall manual take rate of 5% starts to make sense.

That puts VW buyers just behind Subaru buyers (7%) but well ahead of Honda (2.8%) in terms of manual selection.

[via: autoblog]