Frank van Meel outlines why future BMW M manuals face 48-volt, torque, and supplier hurdles without declaring the stick officially finished.
BMW M boss Frank van Meel just gave the clearest answer yet on the manual transmission’s future—and there’s good news. Speaking to BMW Blog, van Meel said: “No, it is not off the table.” That said, the executive won’t make any promises either.
The culprit is 48-volt mild-hybrid technology creeping into the lineup, stacked on top of rising engine torque and a supplier base that keeps shrinking. For anyone who still rows their own gears in an M2, the timeline changes more than the headline.
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Van Meel’s comments walk a careful line between acknowledging reality and refusing to close the door. “It is going to be really difficult,” he said of keeping manuals in the lineup.
He did not dodge the demand question either. “We do acknowledge that there is a high demand, and it is a very emotional issue,” van Meel admitted, and that lines up with what BMW M dealers already see on their lots. In recent G87 model-year sales, about half of US M2 buyers choose the six-speed manual over the automatic. That’s a number hard to ignore even for an automaker pushing hard into electrification.
Today’s lineup backs up that enthusiasm. The manual is available on the rear-wheel-drive M2, while the current G82 M4 CS on sale in the United States is automatic-only with BMW’s eight-speed M Steptronic transmission. The M3 CS Handschalter arrives for 2027 as a limited-run, rear-wheel-drive manual CS priced by BMW at just over $107,000 before destination, and North American dealers quickly claimed their allocation of build slots.
Van Meel’s final line sums up where things stand: “I cannot promise anything.” BMW M says it will revisit the manual’s future rather than kill it outright. That’s a far weaker guarantee than enthusiasts got a few years ago, when van Meel himself argued the manual did not really make sense for the brand’s performance calculations.
2027 BMW M3 CS Handschalter
The engineering problem is mechanical before it is philosophical. BMW’s current six-speed manual cannot handle the full torque output of the S58 twin-turbo inline-six in its most powerful tunes. That’s why the automatic-only M3 and M4 Competition versions already exist alongside the stick-shift base cars.
Layer a 48-volt mild-hybrid system on top of that engine and the packaging gets harder still. Integrating an electric motor, its control software and the added mass into a car still built around a clutch pedal is no simple bolt-on job for BMW‘s engineers.
Suppliers are the other half of the squeeze. Fewer companies worldwide still build manual gearboxes rated for this kind of torque, and BMW M has less leverage to commission a bespoke unit when global manual demand keeps shrinking outside a handful of enthusiast nameplates.
That combination points toward the G80 M3’s current Handschalter likely being the last manual version of that chassis. Industry reports expect the next M3 generation to adopt a mild-hybrid inline-six and likely stick with an automatic transmission, but BMW has not confirmed any details.
Van Meel said the manual will stick around in the M2 for at least a couple more years, though he declined to guarantee anything beyond that window.
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