Enthusiasts don’t get many wins these days. Every other week, you hear about a cool trim being discontinued or an iconic sports car being revived as a hybridized crossover. It’s the same story with manual transmissions. Over the past few years, the number of manual cars available to the buying public has shrunk to just 21 vehicles.
One of those vehicles is the Ford Mustang. The last of America’s pony cars can still be had with two of the car’s three V8-powered trims, the GT and the Dark Horse. Though the stick can no longer be ordered with the base four-cylinder EcoBoost, and was never available on the top-level GTD, being able to pair the six-speed with Ford’s 5.0-liter Coyote engine remains a sort of last bastion for purist American muscle.
Sales of the Mustang are a fraction of what they used to be, so keeping different powertrains in the lineup isn’t as sensible for Ford as it once was. If Ford announced it wouldn’t be bringing back the stick shift for the next generation of Mustang, I wouldn’t be surprised in the slightest (but I would be deeply upset, obviously).
Thankfully, it doesn’t sound like that’s going to happen any time soon, according to CEO Jim Farley. Ford’s head honcho revealed to journalists last weekend during the Formula 1 Melbourne Grand Prix that the manual transmission in the Mustang is here to stay for the foreseeable future. From CarExpert:
Speaking to Australian media including CarExpert at the 2026 Australian Formula 1 Grand Prix in Melbourne, the Ford CEO said: “Out of our cold, dead hands will we not have a manual Mustang.”
While that line sort of makes it sound like Ford is keeping a floating, autonomous set of hands operating on the company’s behalf, similar to the Master Hand character from the video game series Super Smash Bros., locked away somewhere holding onto a stick shift as hard as they possibly can, the phrase is obviously a play on actor Charlton Heston’s famous speech at the 2000 NRA National Convention, speaking on his beliefs regarding the Second Amendment in the lead up to that year’s presidential election. The part of the speech in question is at the 0:58 mark:
“From my cold, dead hands,” a shortened version of “I’ll give you my gun when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.” But in Farley’s case, the cold, dead hands are clutching a shift knob.
It’s pretty well-documented that Farley is an avid car enthusiast and racing driver, so it makes he’d have a similarly strong stance on manual transmissions. Unfortunately, since he did not find himself awakened in the far future surrounded by talking primates, Farley didn’t go full circle and quote Heston from any of his actual films (during this interview, anyway. If you can find any mention of Farley saying something about damned dirty apes somewhere online, please let me know.)
The “our” in that quote does some lifting, suggesting it’s not just him that feels that way, but others within the Ford organization. It’s very likely the higher-ups within Ford have done the math on the manual, both for the Mustang and the Bronco, and realized it might not be worth it to keep them going. Yet, they still exist here, today, in the year 2026. That’s what you get when enthusiasts are in charge. Later in that interview, Farley reiterated the “no boring cars” phrase he’s been throwing around these past few years:
“I really believe Ford best serves the working people and enthusiast drivers,” he said. “And that’s increasingly off-road as well as on-road, and I like to say we don’t have any boring cars at Ford.”
Whether you agree with that statement will depend on whether you think cars like the E-Transit or the Bronco Sport are boring or not. For an automaker as large and diverse as Ford, making every car in its lineup truly exciting is a gargantuan task. But at least it’s trying. In addition to the Mustang, there’s also the Explorer ST and high-performance Raptor versions of the Bronco, the Ranger, and the F-150. That’s a pretty wide range of fun cars.
No matter what you think of Ford’s current lineup, you have to at least give props to the company for helping to keep the manual alive. The stick shift’s future in the Mustang feels as secure as ever, which is a seldom-seen win for enthusiasts everywhere.
Top graphic images: Ford
I thought this was going to be about paper manuals.
I still have a bit of a hard time with the fact that the Mustang is the ONLY actual car that Ford sells in America.
Did he grimace and grab the back of his neck a lot? Those are my go-to moves when doing a Chuck Heston impersonation.
I’ve got a ’14 Mustang with the Chinese-built Getrag MT82.
Farley may not want the manual to die – but Ford’s MT82 might just do that all on it’s own without Farley’s permission. It’s NOT a good transmission.
It’s been a fine transmission in my 2017 Ecoboost Mustang. I’m still saddened that I can’t get that combo again in a newer car.