BMW Just Admitted That Driving Still Matters
A promise to keep the manual alive isn't a nostalgia play — it's a confession about what cars are actually for.
Photo · The Drive
The easiest thing BMW could do is let the manual die quietly. Blame torque figures. Blame electrification. Blame the market. Nobody would push back hard enough to matter.
They're not doing that.
A BMW exec has gone on record promising an engineering solution to the problem of building manual transmissions that can handle the kind of torque modern engines are putting out. That's not a PR softener. That's a resource commitment. Someone signed off on that.
What it really signals is that someone inside Bavaria still believes the act of driving — the physical, imprecise, occasionally frustrating act of rowing your own gears — is worth protecting. Not as a heritage trim level. Not as a limited-run collector item. As a legitimate way to move through the world in a car with a BMW badge on it.
That matters more than the spec sheet ever will.
We are deep into the era of efficiency theater — cars that hit 0–60 in three seconds and feel like appliances doing it. Fast, yes. Involving, no. The manual doesn't fix everything, but it does one thing nothing else can: it puts you in the loop. You are part of the machine. You can get it wrong. You can get it exactly right.
BMW promising to engineer around the torque problem isn't them being sentimental. It's them betting that a certain kind of driver — the kind who actually chose the car instead of just acquiring it — still exists and still buys things.
They're right. Go prove it to them.