Automatic or manual? Which transmissions were most often offered in passenger cars in January?

Analysts of the Institute of Car Market Research processed data provided by the aggregator Automoto.ua, which collects information from all sites containing advertisements for the sale of vehicles, and determined the overall picture by gearbox type, as well as separately for 15 car brands that are most frequently listed in offers for sale. Only newly created advertisements in January 2025, without duplicates, were taken into account.

The general picture of the distribution of market shares in terms of supply shows that stereotypes about unreliability, high repair costs, and the general uselessness of "automatics" are becoming a thing of the past. Only a few percent are missing for the shares of manual and automatic transmissions to equalize, or for automatic transmissions to prevail, if not for historical circumstances, as a result of which our car fleet was once overflowing with various kinds of *AZs, which were offered exclusively with manual gearboxes without any alternative.

As for the "not specified" sector, it can be commented on as lagging behind the time requirements of individual resources for placing ads, where sellers are offered to specify the type of gearbox, with the option of choosing between automatic and manual, while at the same time ignoring the presence of electric cars on the market — after all, they (with the exception of a few sports models) do not have a gearbox structurally, which is why people hesitate about where to classify such options, or do not specify anything.

For individual brands, in particular among the 15 with the most ads, the picture (similar to the overview of fuel and drivetrains ) is heterogeneous, which is due to the historical features of the arrival of a particular brand on our market, as well as its average age.

Manual transmissions are present on almost 100% of VAZs and most Daewoos. Also among the leaders in the share of manual transmissions are brands such as Opel, Renault and Skoda.

The proportion is close to 50/50 for the leader of the secondary market Volkswagen, as well as for Ford. Mazda can also be included in these manufacturers, with some rounding of the shares.

Automatic transmissions are most often found on BMW (75%), Audi (73%), and Toyota (72%). A somewhat smaller, but still solid (more than half) presence of automatic transmission versions is found on Mercedes-Benz, Nissan, Hyundai, and KIA.

Given the stable trend of increasing the share of cars with automatic transmissions on the market, as well as the growth of the share of electric cars (which are controlled according to the same principles as cars with an "automatic"), as well as the gradual decommissioning of discontinued VAZ and Daewoo, the share of cars with automatic transmissions will increase annually, and this will continue until the entire fleet is replaced by electric cars (or cars similar in design that do not have a gearbox, but only a gearbox or direct drive motor-wheel or similar).

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