Manual Mustangs Are Here To Stay - Will Have To Be Ripped From Ford's 'Cold, Dead Hands'

For years, there has been plenty of talk about stick shifts being a dying breed. While it's still true that the manual transmission is very unlikely to ever regain popularity in mainstream car models, there are signs that increasing numbers of enthusiasts are stepping up to stop them from disappearing entirely. Data collected by Motor1 found that several of the few remaining car models that still offer a stick in the U.S. actually saw a modest sales increase in 2025. Plus, some auto industry bosses are still keen to keep them alive regardless of sales figures. One of those bosses is Ford's Jim Farley. He recently told Drive Australia that he will ensure that the Mustang stays around for as long as he's at the company, adding that bean counters would have to prise a manual Mustang "out of our cold, dead hands." 

Sales of the Mustang in America have declined significantly over the last two decades, but there are signs of a small uptick in buyer interest in 2025. According to data from CarFigures, Ford sold just over 45,000 Mustangs in the U.S. in 2025, beating 2024's sales figure of roughly 37,000 units. Both numbers still pale in comparison to the 166,000 Mustangs that Ford sold two decades ago in 2006. Only a fraction of those recent buyers chose a Mustang with a manual transmission. Ford has not confirmed the split of manual and automatic sales in 2025, but the company previously said that 27% of GT and Dark Horse buyers in 2024 opted for a stick shift.

Farley's confirmation that manual Mustangs are safe will certainly be reassuring for pony car enthusiasts who worry that the car might end up going the way of the Chevy Camaro. It's not entirely good news for the purists though. The Ford boss made the comment in response to a question posed by Drive Australia about whether the company would keep the Mustang "with a V8 in its current form." Notably, the outlet says that they didn't explicitly mention manual transmissions in their original question.

The part Farley didn't answer is just as important as what he actually said, with his refusal to confirm that the V8-powered Mustang will live on potentially suggesting that its days might be numbered. So what might it be replaced with? The four-cylinder EcoBoost Mustang already serves as the entry point in the Mustang range, and it is significantly more efficient than its V8-powered sibling. The company made a 660 horsepower V6 engine for the GT supercar, so it has plenty of experience squeezing maximum power out of six-cylinder engines too.

Granted, no enthusiast is buying a Mustang — or any other performance car, for that matter — for its efficiency, but it's still an important consideration for Ford, since the Mustang is sold in markets all over the world. Many of those markets, including Europe and Australia, are tightening their emissions standards further in the coming years, so there might come a day when the company simply can't make a V8 that's clean enough to be sold there.

Whether that means the V8 will eventually disappear altogether remains unclear. For now, demand from U.S. buyers for V8-powered cars remains strong, and some brands are even resurrecting their previously discontinued V8 models. If that demand continues, Ford could potentially restrict sales of the V8 Mustang to markets like the U.S., where emissions regulations aren't as demanding. 

Markets with tighter regulations could potentially receive a V6 version of the car, or even be limited to only the four-cylinder model. Either way, it seems that the stick-shift Mustang is safe, even if the V8 engines that have powered the car for more than six decades aren't necessarily going to be around forever.