That’s true for rentals, they don’t want idiots screwing up their gearboxes. But, most cars on the streets are manuals, and you can’t get a driver’s license if you don’t know how to drive one.
That is only true in poorer European countries with older, cheaper vehicle fleets. Most new car sales in more affluent countries no longer have manual transmissions. Modern automatics with 8+ forward gears or CVTs are more fuel efficient than manuals and easier to integrate as part of hybrid systems. And of course EV sales are growing rapidly: they don't use conventional transmissions at all.
New car sales - of course, but average car age even in Germany is around 10 years, it gets better only in wealthy small countries like Switzerland or Luxembourg.
I seriously doubt there’s a majority of automatic in
Germans and French’s individual buyers. In fact most people that don’t rent cars don’t are very hesitant when required to drive one (if that ever happen)
I don't know, anecdotally, all my friends (besides me, if I count as a friend of mine) drive automatic.
> and you can’t get a driver’s license if you don’t know how to drive one.
This is definitely not true in a bunch of countries, where you get to chose if to take a license for manual or automatic, where if you chose manual you can drive both and if you chose automatic, you obviously only get to drive automatic ones.
