Roughly 40 percent of buyers still order a manual with the current Ford Mustang GT’s 5.0-liter V8 — but only about 10 percent do the same with the turbocharged EcoBoost four-cylinder, according to Ford’s own statement on why it dropped the stick shift from EcoBoost models for 2024. That EcoBoost number is so low that Ford didn’t quietly let take rates slide — it made a public business decision to stop offering the option at all, and pony cars are the segment where that decision is happening fastest.

An industry near zero, a segment further along than most

Context matters here, because the entire new-car industry has already gone nearly extinct for manuals. Manual transmissions sank below 1 percent of total U.S. production in model year 2021 and have stayed there since, according to EPA Automotive Trends Report data cited in that analysis, down from roughly 35 percent of new vehicle sales as recently as 1980. J.D. Power separately clocked the take rate at 1.7 percent for a partial 2023 result, and JATO Dynamics confirmed it was “definitely below 1%” across the same period. Against that backdrop, a pony car V8 holding at 40 percent looks almost countercultural — but the trend line inside that specific segment is what should worry manual-transmission loyalists, because the EcoBoost Mustang’s stick shift didn’t decline gradually. It went from an available option to gone.

Why the V8 cars are the last holdouts

The Mustang GT’s comparatively healthy 40 percent manual take rate isn’t an accident of engineering — it’s a self-selecting audience problem. Buyers who specifically want a V8 pony car in 2026 are disproportionately enthusiasts who cross-shopped the manual on purpose, rather than commuters who wandered in wanting a sporty-looking car with an automatic. That’s a fundamentally different buyer pool than the EcoBoost four-cylinder crowd, many of whom bought the Mustang badge and the styling without ever caring much about rowing their own gears. Chevrolet ran into an almost identical version of this problem with the C7 Corvette, where fewer than 20 percent of buyers chose the manual — a number low enough that General Motors eliminated the manual option entirely when the C8 launched, rather than continuing to engineer and certify a transmission fewer than one in five buyers wanted.

Camaro’s exit removes the comparison entirely

The picture gets starker once you remember that the sixth-generation Chevrolet Camaro is no longer in production at all — Chevrolet ended the current generation after the 2024 model year, taking its manual-equipped SS and 1LE variants off sale entirely rather than watching take rates erode further. That leaves the Mustang as the only V8 pony car in the U.S. market still offering a manual transmission on any trim, a genuine last-man-standing position in a segment that, as recently as the 2000s, had multiple manufacturers competing to sell three-pedal performance cars to the same buyers.

What automakers are actually optimizing for

None of this is really about driver preference in isolation — it’s about what a manual transmission costs an automaker to keep building. Every additional transmission variant requires its own emissions certification, its own crash-test validation, and its own parts logistics stream, costs that get harder to justify as the buyer pool shrinks. A four-cylinder engine with a 10 percent manual take rate is bleeding money on a transmission option almost nobody wants, while a V8 halo model with 40 percent uptake still pencils out — barely — because enthusiast buyers are willing to pay a premium for exactly that option. That math, more than nostalgia or driving purity, is what’s actually deciding which cars keep the stick shift and which ones quietly lose it in a press release nobody reads until their favorite configuration disappears.

The last gear standing

Pony cars aren’t dying faster than sedans or hatchbacks because buyers there love manuals less — they’re thinning out faster because they’re one of the last segments where a meaningful minority of buyers ever wanted one in the first place, which makes every incremental drop in take rate a bigger deal to automakers watching the spreadsheet. When the segment built almost entirely around driving enjoyment starts losing the stick shift, that’s not a footnote. That’s the canary.