Transmission: Manual or Automatic?

Manual Transmission are slowly dying. Fewer and fewer stick-shift vehicles arrive in Philippine market and it only shows that the era of three pedal driving is coming to an end.

Some says that manuals should stay because they are a lot cheaper to maintain than automatics. That has been the notion for decades. Well this is actually true during the old times. However, the recent AT transmission gearbox requires preventive maintenance service every 40,000 km which costs more or less P8,000. While in a manual transmission gear box, the preventive maintenance service would be about every 60,000 km. Including the clutch-disc replacement, it would cost more or less P15,000. This means that the servicing of an automatic transmission may be a bit more frequent but the manual transmission servicing costs a lot more.

There are instances wherein clutch discs wouldn't need replacement until after 100,000km, so the costs really depends. in general, barring any major breakdowns and assuming your car is being serviced in CASA regularly, you'd have to shell out more cash to properly maintain a manual transmission over the first half decade or so.

In general, car buyers don't really have the intention of selling their cars after just five or ten years, so an automatic car being cheaper to maintain within the first decade may not really be all that relevant to a lot of people.