One thing I didn't see discussed is the overhead costs of keeping an unpopular option available in new vehicle designs. An automaker could easily have to commit an extra $10 million in overhead costs to provide a major option like a stick shift in a new product: design costs, tooling costs, inventory tracking, extra sections in service manuals, dealer service tech training, repair parts inventory and management, etc.
If you sell 250,000 pickups per year and you can't sell over 2 percent (5,000 units a year) with the stick shift option, how do you recover you extra $10 million overhead on those 5,000 units ($2,000 per vehicle)? If you pass the full $2,000 overhead cost to the customer, your sales department projects that stick shift option sales could drop further, say to 2,000 units a year instead of 5,000 ($5,000 overhead per vehicle). At some point you stop eating the losses and drop unpopular options.
Full size pickups are not available with manual steering anymore. That I know of, full size cars have not been available with a stick shift since the 1960's. At one time those were popular.
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Today's Featured Article - Grain Threshing in the Early 40's - by Pat Browning. The setting is rural Wisconsin, halfway between East Troy and Elkhorn, on Hodunk Road, our nation was at war, and I was 6, 7 and 8 years old. George was our "threshing neighbor." He was the one with the threshing machine, a JI Case on steel wheels, and he pulled it to our farm with a JI Case standard tractor also on steel. In those days, steel wheeled implements were common. The roads were general gravel, so the lugs cutting into them wasn't a problem. George would set up the thresher, s
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