Sales of manual-transmission cars downshifted once again in 2019, dropping to just 1.1 percent of all new-vehicle sales in the U.S. For an idea of just how lowly that share of the market is, electric vehicles grabbed 1.6 percent, equating to about 270,000 sales. Those figures were highlighted at Green Car Reports, which sourced its data from J.D. Power's Power Information Network (PIN).

Americans have been drifting away from stick-shift cars for years, but the inflection point where EVs are outselling them paints the trend in stark terms. After all, sure, Teslas are popular and electric vehicles are gaining ever-more mainstream traction, but they remain outliers in a gasoline-fueled and—apparently—automatically shifted market. On trend with their sales decline, manual-transmission vehicles have been disappearing from automakers' lineups; in 2020, your options for a stick-shift vehicle have dwindled mightily.