Ignition Point: Make it ‘til you fake it

The removal of the gearbox was therefore not a compromise. It was engineering progress.

Direct drive is demonstrably more efficient. The manual clutch was a source of user error. The automatic gearbox added weight and complexity and cost. Get rid of them. The engineers were correct about all of this in the narrow technical sense that engineering correctness operates in.

What the engineers were less correct about was the reason people liked the gearbox. They liked it not because it was technically superior to direct drive. They liked it because it required them to do something. It made them participants in the process of making the car go fast, rather than passengers in a very capable machine going fast on their behalf.

The gear lever, the clutch pedal, the precise moment of the upshift, the heel-and-toe downchange that takes years to learn and feels like a small private victory every time you get it right: none of these things are technically necessary. All of them are experientially essential to the feeling of driving rather than being driven.

The industry removed them. The customers noticed. And now the industry is spending billions on software to pretend they are still there.

This is worth sitting with for a moment, because it is genuinely extraordinary when you examine it directly. The BMW M5 is one of the most expensive and technologically sophisticated cars available to buy in September 2026.

Its development cost hundreds of millions of pounds. Its electric motors are the product of decades of accumulated engineering knowledge. And a meaningful portion of that development budget has been spent building a system that makes the car behave as if it has something it does not have, because the thing it does not have turns out to be the thing that matters.

The Renault 5 Turbo 3E is the clearest illustration of the absurdity. It is a modern electric hot hatch that simulates the five-speed manual gearbox of the original Renault 5 Turbo from 1980.

The 1980 car had a gearbox because electric motors had not yet made gearboxes redundant. The 2026 car has a simulation of that gearbox because the engineers who made electric motors redundant have now made the gearbox’s absence feel like a loss.

The customers who buy the Renault 5 Turbo 3E will change gears that do not exist in a car that does not need them, because the act of changing gear is the point, and it always was, and the industry took twenty years to understand this.

McLaren understood it differently. The P50 was revealed at Monterey with a real manual gearbox, three real pedals, and a naturally aspirated engine screaming to 10,000 real revolutions per minute. Fewer than 100 examples. More than $2m each. Every single one sold before the car was officially on sale. The waiting list for the opportunity to spend two million dollars on a car with a gear lever was longer than the production run.

The fake gearbox costs development budget and engineering time. The real gearbox costs the customer $2m. Both are responses to the same underlying truth. The things that make driving feel like driving rather than transportation are not unnecessary complexity to be designed away. They are the product. They always were the product.

The speed was incidental. The sensation was the point.

Ferrari understood this badly and expensively when it built the Luce. The speakers playing recorded engine sounds are an admission, audible at any volume, that something has been lost.

The BMW M5’s fake gearbox is the same admission, expressed in software. The Hyundai Ioniq 5 N’s simulated changes, calibrated over months to feel exactly like the real thing, are an acknowledgement that the real thing mattered in a way that the specification sheet never captured.

And somewhere in Malvern, where Morgan still builds cars with ash wood frames and mechanical switches and absolutely no software approximation of anything, nine Midsummer Coupés are being finished by hand for nine people who decided that what they wanted was the genuine article and were prepared to pay for it accordingly.

The industry removed the gearbox. The gearbox cost two million dollars to get back.

The industry spent billions on software to fake it for everyone else.

The software is good. It is not the same thing.

It never is.