Alan Macey is clutching the past. Three years ago, he persuaded his wife to ditch the family automatic for a car with a manual transmission, once commonly known as the stick shift.

“I had just had enough of driving this soulless refrigerator,” he said.

But the 33-year-old Michigan man, a designer at Jeep, part of Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV , knows only too well the downshifting fortunes of the stick.

The proportion of cars and light trucks in the U.S. sold with manual transmissions has fallen to around 7% in 2014 from 35% in 1980, according to WardsAuto, which keeps data on car manufacturing and sales.

The decline is expected to accelerate as high-performance sports cars, once holdouts, increasingly shift to hybrid automatics.