The one area where Ford and GM remain kings in Australia

Back in May 2017, I wrote a feature for this site on the last performance manuals you could buy here in Australia. I made the cut-off a fairly arbitrary 250kW and this was what I came up with.

• Aston Martin Vantage
• Ford Mustang
• Ford Focus RS
• Jaguar F Type V6
• Lotus Exige
• Lotus Evora
• Porsche 718 Boxster S / Cayman S
• Porsche 911
• BMW M2 Pure
• BMW M3 / M4
• Holden Commodore SS/SS V
• HSV Clubsport / GTS / GTSR / GTSR W1
• HSV Maloo
• HSV Senator

It won’t have escaped your attention that quite a few of those cars are no longer available. We’ve lost the Holdens and HSVs, and you can no longer buy an Aston Martin Vantage with three pedals and a stick.

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The Focus RS has passed on and, until late 2020 at least, you can’t get a manual gearbox with a Porsche 911. Jaguar has phased the manual out for the facelift F Type and BMW is even moving towards making its manual models the cost-plus option over the base price of the standard autos/dual-clutchers.

And that got me thinking. Even more sobering is the list of rear-drive manual V8s. You can now get a Mustang or a Camaro. That’s it (and variants thereof).

While there’s something slightly heart-warming about Ford and GM being the last holdouts of this particular genre, it’s an exclusively American segment now.

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Gone are the days of BMW, Jaguar, Mercedes, Ferrari, Lamborghini and Aston Martin also offering us this template for a raw and charismatic driver’s car.

Yep, times change but have they really changed that much?

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Hit up the comments and let us know how you feel about the demise of this once-vibrant slice of the market.