I LEARNED TO drive in my mother’s Mazda 626.

It had a gear lever that felt like stirring a bucket of gravel and a clutch that, on a hill start, tested friendships, marriages and the patience of everyone sitting behind you at the lights. But I loved it.

Most people my age have a car like that somewhere in their memory. The first car you stalled. The first car you got properly moving in third gear. The first car where you finally understood what a biting point was, usually about six months after somebody first tried to explain it to you. For millions of Irish drivers, learning to drive meant learning a manual. That is ending, and faster than most people realise.

The numbers tell the story

The shift in the new car market is dramatic. In 2016, 121,661 new manual cars were registered in Ireland against just 24,989 automatics. That is roughly five manuals for every automatic.

In 2026 so far, those numbers have not just changed. They have flipped. 51,138 new automatics have been sold against 13,703 manuals. Nearly four automatics for every manual.

But the more striking number is on the second-hand forecourt — because the used market usually takes years to catch up with new car trends. DoneDeal Cars’ live inventory data, which tracks every car for sale on the platform daily, shows that for the entirety of 2022, 2023, 2024 and most of 2025, manual cars consistently outnumbered automatics on the site, often by tens of thousands. In late 2021, there were roughly 56,000 manual cars listed against just 22,000 automatics. Manuals outnumbered automatics by more than two to one.

That changed in the first quarter of 2026. For the first time in DoneDeal’s history, automatics overtook manuals on the platform. As of this week, there are 51,044 automatics listed against 41,956 manuals — and the gap is widening every month.

What is striking is not just that automatics have surged. It is that manuals have started to disappear. The number of manual cars listed on DoneDeal has fallen by more than a quarter in four years. Every month, a few thousand more manual cars are scrapped, exported, or quietly retired from the Irish road network, and they are not being replaced. The manual gearbox, in other words, is going........

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