17 March 2025

Automatics Account for Nearly One-Third of Total Vehicles in the UK

Over the past decade, the UK has experienced a significant shift towards automatic vehicles, now comprising nearly 30% of all cars on the road. This trend is closely linked to the rise in electric vehicles and hybrids, which are predominantly automatic.

Rewinding to 2014, only 16.3% of vehicles on UK roads were automatic. Fast forward to 2024, and that figure has nearly doubled to 29.3%. The number of automatic cars has surged from 7.1 million to over 15.5 million, while manual cars have grown at a much slower rate, rising just 2.4% from 36.6 million to 37.5 million.

This shift has accelerated in recent years. In 2014, approximately 400,000 new automatic cars were registered in the UK. By 2024, that number had tripled to 1.3 million. Meanwhile, manual registrations have plummeted—from 708,000 in 2014 to just 274,000 in 2024. The tipping point came in 2020, marking the last year of manual car growth, with only 23,000 new registrations.

A major factor behind this transition is the growing presence of EVs and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs), all of which use automatic transmissions. The UK now has approximately 1.3 million registered EVs, accounting for about 4% of all vehicles on the road, with around 715,000 PHEVs registered in the UK.

Many brands, including Kia, Land Rover, and MG, are prioritising automatic models and phasing out manual options altogether. Kia alone now accounts for 5.1% of all automatic registrations.

And it's not just the cars that are changing, drivers are too. A decade ago, only 550,000 UK drivers held automatic-only licences. By 2022, that number had more than doubled to over 1.1 million, and that trend is expected to continue. With the ease and accessibility of automatic transmissions, more and more new drivers are choosing the automatic route from the get-go.

With manufacturers shifting away from manual transmissions and EV adoption rising, the manual gearbox is quickly becoming obsolete. The question now is how this trend will influence business and fleet vehicle preferences in the coming years.