Enlarge / A dying breed, but not extinct yet. (credit: Porsche)

Despite car enthusiasts' best efforts, the manual transmission’s days are numbered. Blame it on electrification, future autonomous technologies, or the fact that kids these days just don’t care about driving. Whatever helps you cope with this inevitability, the demise of the stick shift is not an "if," it’s a "when."

That’s not to say the manual’s death will be quick; plenty of companies continue to offer three-pedal setups. But who will be the final holdout, the last bastion of the DIY gearbox? Will it be a sports car or an out-of-left-field contender? Put on your speculation cap as we explore some potential scenarios.

Option 1: Porsche

Arguably no car company is as committed to stick shifts as Porsche. The German automaker offers six- and seven-speed gearboxes in multiple models across its 718 and 911 car lines and continues to do so despite competitors discontinuing their manual options.

Enlarge / Nine GTP race cars from Acura, Cadillac, BMW, and Porsche took part in this year's 24-hour race at Daytona. (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)

DAYTONA BEACH, FLA.—With just one race on the books, it's probably too soon to declare this the dawn of a new golden era in racing, but that thought was on many minds at last weekend's spectator-packed Rolex 24 at Daytona. The grueling 24-hour race is the season-opening event for the WeatherTech Sportscar Championship, and 2023 saw the introduction of a new class of hybrid prototype race cars called GTP (for Grand Touring Prototype).

The crowds were heavier than ever, buoyed by the debut of the new machines, which put on a good show. And the complicated new energy-based pit stop formula didn't appear to present anyone any trouble.

The same can't be said for the race itself. Twenty-four-hour racing is hard —I speak from some experience—and making it to the end should be, and is, a challenge. A 24-hour race as the first race of the year for all-new cars is even more difficult, despite the thousands of miles each car covered in testing over the past few months. As such, some feared we might be in for a repeat of 2003; that year saw a new prototype class introduced, the best of which finished 24 laps behind the winning car, a racing version of a Porsche 911.

Enlarge / The #6 Porsche Penske 963 and the #10 Konica Minolta Acura ARX-06 run on Daytona's banking during the 2023 Roar Before the 24. With so many miles of testing completed, the Porsches are probably the favorites, but 24 hours is a long time in racing, and a lot can happen. (credit: Jake Galstad/LAT Images)

This past weekend saw the successful conclusion of the International Motor Sports Association's "Roar Before the 24," the series' preseason test ahead of this coming weekend's Rolex 24, a 24-hour race held each January at Daytona International Speedway in Florida. This year, the preseason test was more important than most, as there's a new kind of race car, called the GTP, competing in the Rolex 24 in 2023.

The new hybrid prototype category has attracted more manufacturer interest than we've seen in many years, with brands like Acura and Porsche building new cars to compete and others, like Lamborghini, waiting in the wings to join next year. But the biggest question is whether these new race cars will be able to make it to the end of the race. As in the larger automotive industry, supply shortages mean that spare parts are scarce, so the consequences of a crash are calamitous.

But what makes GTP—originally called LMDh—so attractive to car makers? I asked David Salters, head of Honda Performance Development, which oversees the Japanese OEM's racing activities in North America.

Enlarge / The HIF synthetic fuel plant near Punta Arenas in Chile. (credit: Porsche)

This week, a Chilean startup called Highly Innovative Fuels officially opened its first synthetic gasoline production facility. HIF was created to run the new plant, which is the result of a collaboration between the automaker Porsche , Siemens Energy, Exxon Mobil, Enel Green Power, the Chilean state energy company ENAP, and Empresas Gasco. Initially, the site will produce around 34,000 gallons (130,000 L) a year, scaling up to 14.5 million gallons (55 million L) a year by 2024, with plans to increase that tenfold to 145 million gallons (550 million L) a year by 2026. The first gasoline produced by the plant was used to ceremonially fill a Porsche 911, a task performed by Chile's energy minister, Diego Pardow.

"Yesterday, we celebrated together with all the employees from HIF and our partners, this historic moment," said Barbara Frenkel, Porsche's board member for procurement. "It was a very special evening, because we are encountering something which is of course, very important to us for our sustainability strategy, but also as we see big potential in efuels for the decarbonisation of the Earth's climate. So, the synthetic fuel we are producing here, stemming from wind energy, water and CO ₂ is really a compelling idea," she said.

The site, located in Punta Arenas in Southern Chile, will use wind to power the process—the area sees high winds roughly 270 days a year, and a wind turbine can expect to produce up to four times as much energy as one in Europe, according to Frenkel.

Enlarge / Danish racing driver Tom Kristensen leads another pair of Audi RS e-tron GTs through the corkscrew corner at Laguna Seca. (credit: Audi)

Call it platform sharing, call it badge engineering, call it what you like—car companies have collaborated with each other to make cars for much of the automobile's history. Sometimes these link-ups happen between companies that might normally be considered rivals: Honda and Rover in the 1980s; the BMW/Toyota project that gave us the new Supra; or perhaps the forthcoming electric vehicle platform-sharing between Ford and Volkswagen or General Motors and Honda .

More often, it occurs among the shared brands of a single OEM—Chrysler Group's K platform in the 1980s is a good example. But few automakers have exploited the advantages of that quite like Volkswagen Group, which builds hundreds of different vehicles across its 10 brands around the world using just a handful of different platforms. The vast majority of these—and we're talking several million cars a year—are built on VW Group's MQB platform, which can give rise to anything from an Audi A3 to a Volkswagen Transporter van, with cars and crossovers and SUVs of most sizes and shapes.

The RS e-tron GT is a little draggier than the Taycan, with a Cd of 0.24. (credit: Audi)

But even as you go up the price scale, this practice is still widely used. For example, for decades Bentleys were basically Rolls-Royces with a slightly different nose; today, they share platforms with Porsche's Panamera and Cayenne. And it's why the handsome four-door EV in this review wears Audi RS e-tron GT badging yet features very Porsche Taycan-like specifications—a consequence of sharing the same J1 platform.

Enlarge / The exterior clues that this is a Porsche 718 GT4 ePerformance and not a 718 GT4 Clubsport are subtle; it's 140 mm (5.5 inches) wider, and the headlight projectors look more like a Taycan's than a Cayman's. But it's an all-electric car with more than a thousand horsepower on tap. (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)

FRANCIACORTA, ITALY—The auto industry is in the midst of a mass transformation as we move towards product lineups that are mostly or even entirely electric. Some are handling this transformation better than others, as supply chain problems caused by the pandemic and invasion of Ukraine add further complications. Witness the sorry state of Jaguar, which cancelled an electric replacement for the XJ sedan at the last minute, or the repeated electric vehicle-related missteps we've seen from Toyota , Honda , and Mazda of late.

There appear to be no such woes at Porsche, however. In 2019 it debuted the Taycan , a four-door electric sportscar that remains one of the best EVs on sale . Since then it's added new Taycan variants, two different flavors of EV wagon included, all built in a factory in Zuffenhausen, Germany that's already carbon-neutral . (Porsche's Zuffenhausen factory uses a very heavy mix of renewable energy and biogas from waste materials, and has been independently certified by Germany's DGNB.)

But Porsche isn't resting on its laurels. Fine though the Taycan is, it really is just the start of the OEM's electrified journey—as long as you aren't counting some of Ferdinand Porsche's very earliest vehicles, like the Egger-Lohner C2 Phaeton of 1898 . Future battery EVs from Porsche will use an all-new flexible architecture called PPE—for premium platform electric—which the company is developing together with fellow VW Group sibling Audi (with Porsche taking the lead here).

Enlarge (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)

FRANCIACORTA, ITALY—Last night, Porsche unveiled its latest racing car at its Italian Porsche Experience Center, midway between Milan and Verona. The 99X is the marque's new Formula E car, as Porsche becomes the first of that series' competitors to show off its Gen3 machinery before the start of season nine. That gets underway in Mexico City in mid-January, and good news: Fanboost is definitely a thing of the past .

As the "Gen3" name suggests, it's the third race car design to compete in Formula E, and we've come a long way from the original Spark SRT_01E , which only had enough battery capacity to complete half a race. The new car isn't quite as light as we thought , but at 1,874 lbs (850 kg) it's still a chunk lighter than the Gen2 car, and 220 lbs (100 kg) of that was from the battery.

The new car can regeneratively brake its front wheels now, but only the rear electric motor can deploy power as well as recuperate it. (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)

"Overall, the new car is smaller, is shorter, shorter track width, more agile, it's lighter, more powerful. Compared to Gen2 where we had recuperation of maximum 250 kW (335 hp), we now have 600 kW (805 hp), which is more than double," said Florian Modlinger, head of Porsche's Formula E program.