It’s been 14 years since the last Ferrari with a good old-fashioned manual gearbox left the factory in Maranello, and a handful of prancing horse enthusiasts have been clamoring for another row-your-own model since. Over the years, the number of voices in that crowd has grown to a point where Ferrari had to do something. The 12Cilindri Manuele is that something, and it’s weirder than you’d expect.
First, some background on the 12Cilindri, Ferrari’s front-engined V12 grand tourer for the 2020s. Like the 812 Superfast that came before it, the heart of the Enzo lives on underneath the extra-long hood of the 12Cilindri, now turned up to 819 horsepower. There are no turbos here, no supercharging, not even a hybrid system. It’s a full-fat, no nonsense GT car in the traditional sense, albeit with an eight-speed dual-clutch automatic.
The 12Cilindri Manuale…also has an eight-speed dual-clutch automatic, although not quite like any unit we’ve seen. In the car’s center console, you’ll find buttons for reverse, neutral, drive, and low gear, along with a giant gated shifter. Reverse is up and on the left, and you get six gates for gears one-through-six. Where are seventh and eighth? Not used when rowing your own. It’s a definite departure from paddle shifters, but don’t just think of this as the modern version of the Valeo automated clutch setup you could get on a Mondial. The other party piece to the 12Cilindri Manuale sits in the footwell.
Yes, that’s a pedal to the left of the brake, but it’s not connected to a hydraulic cylinder. Instead, it’s entirely clutch-by-wire, letting drivers manually control clutch actuation in the dual-clutch transaxle by reading pedal position and uptake rate, then transcribing that to the actuators. Ferrari assures that operation of this pedal is really up to the driver. It’s possible to stall the 12Cilindri Manuale even though it doesn’t have a traditional manual gearbox.
On the flipside, to prevent money-shifting the V12, Ferrari’s devised a lockout for the shifter to prevent moments of cringe-inducing mechanical destruction. As the marque notes, “If the clutch is not depressed, or an unauthorised gear is selected, the system is able to mechanically inhibit engagement, preventing the operation from being completed; when the lock is not active, however, the kinematic mechanism is free to move.” A little bit like training wheels, perhaps for owners who haven’t driven a car with a manual gearbox in ages.
The 12Cilindri Manuale isn’t the first production car we’ve seen with a simulated manual gearbox, but it takes a very different approach than Koenigsegg does in its CC850. That shift-by-wire unit doesn’t use traditional selector forks, or synchronizers. Instead, it uses seven wet clutches, six to select forward ratios and one for reverse, all with their own pressure sensors and mechatronic actuators. Changing up is as simple as engaging the right clutches. In contrast, Ferrari’s gated DCT is much more traditional in design. In addition to having a wet clutch for each shaft of gears, selector forks engage the actual desired gearset, like you’d find in a regular manual gearbox except with mechatronics doing the work instead of a purely mechanical shifting mechanism.
In that sense, the gearbox in the 12Cilindri Manuale is more like a real manual, only with a funky clutch arrangement and wires instead of hydraulic lines and cables. Sort-of like how just about every accelerator pedal nowadays isn’t directly connected to a throttle body. Besides, the era of 2000s performance cars that everyone bangs on about for their so-called analog nature isn’t really analog. Not with electronic ignition and digital fuel control, not with drive-by-wire throttle bodies or traction control. The reason people love cars like the 550 Maranello, the Lamborghini Murcielago, the E46 BMW M3, and the Honda S2000 is because they work perfectly well as normal cars without any old car fiddliness, but the driver’s still an important part of the experience. How much you get out of it depends on how much you put into it behind the wheel.
Really, the only shame about the 12Cilindri Manuale is that Ferrari’s only building 1,500 of the things. That’s fewer than 200 more than the production run of the F40. However, this shift-by-wire setup might just save a certain aspect of driving engagement we thought would be ending in the next decade or so. Being able to run a car in automatic mode for drive-by noise testing, fuel economy testing, and all the mildly irksome regulatory hurdles that favor automatic transmissions is a big advantage, and so long as the by-wire clutch and shifter are calibrated well, those who love driving can have their fun too. It might not be a manual gearbox as we know it, but if the tech trickles down and saves rowing-your-own in the performance cars normal people can actually afford, it’s not bad, is it?
Top graphic image: Ferrari
Clutch-by-wire is a cursed word.
The pessimistic engineer in me says that this isn’t exactly mind blowing tech, and they should have done this sooner. It was funny watching Harry Metcalf talk about it as if it were some sort of wizard’s potion (which he is profoundly good at [just watch his auction videos], but I think he genuinely believed that this tech was space age).
The optimist in me says that I’m glad that Ferrari is seeing that raw numbers only go so far, and people want to feel things about their sports cars
I will never be able to afford this, but I am cautiously optimistic that this could be a future direction for the manual. As the article mentions, we already have throttle-by-wire, so is this really that much more of a stretch? As long as the pedal feels right,the shifter feels real, and the vehicle actually does what I tell it to (within reason, I like the no money shifting protections) without lag, I think this could be awesome. Plus, the ability to turn on DCT mode for when you’re sitting in traffic is actually a pretty cool feature.
This will break in imaginative and wildly expensive ways.
The appeal of modern Ferraris is *severely* lost on me. Count me in the Jay Leno camp.
Now a 456GT with a gated manual? I would consider selling a kidney. No idea how I would pay the running costs. What other organs can you do without?
Ferrari doesn’t sell cars. Rather, they sell investment-grade rolling sculpture to select buyers of their choosing. Jay Leno is right.
That’s just silly.
You want to stave off dementia?
Learn Italian instead.
This seems a bit silly, in that if there’s really demand for a 6 speed, the customer who demands one would pay enough to cover development costs, whatever those are.
I hate the “rich people are rich, so they’ll pay anything” attitude, but in this case it’s probably true. 1500 units, charging an extra $100,000 for a gated manual option, and you have $150 million to cover engineering and testing. Not enough? Charge $200,000 for the option. Force someone to buy 3 Luces. Whatever, they wouldn’t care.
I read somewhere that this costs twice as much as regular 12Cilindri (which as someone said, is a silly name).
€250,000 x 1,500 = €375,000,000.
Surely they can fit a regular manual for that?
But why do that when they can spend half of the development costs or less and still sell all 1500? I’m not saying that is the right thing for them to do but it may have been what got the bean counters to approve this model at all
The base car is around EUR 400k or USD 470k, the manual is at around EUR 590k or USD 675k.
I don’t think it’s silly at all. It likely means that regulatory and engineering costs are minimized, and it can act as a “bolt on” technology for basically any car that they make. You can’t just use the same manual transmission for every car. If this gets sticks back into sports cars, then so be it
Aside from the name (12 Cylindri? Are they just… naming the cars after stuff they have now? The Maserati Quattroporte would like a word) this is as close as a modern Ferrari gets to being really desirable. Will they come out with a version where the screen in front of the passenger only displays a leather-grain pattern to complete the classic Ferrari illusion?
If this can feel like a proper manual and have the same shifting speeds and control of a proper manual, I really don’t see the problem. We already have lock-out gates, anti-stall throttle blips and no lift shifting for modern manuals, this looks more like an evolution of that than necessarily an “auto-manual”
This Ferrari is unobtanium for most of us but if it proves popular I would consider buying something like a GTI with this setup.
This is cool, if only for pointing the way to how we might see more driver engagement in our future vehicles. After all, that’s what our love of manuals is all about – it’s not that we love gears or something, it’s that we love driving as an activity in itself, not driving as the cause of the effect of being somewhere else.
With the EV future fully in view, some of the things about ICE cars we love are going to have to go, but I’m hopeful they can be replaced by other things like this that make driving more an experience instead of less.
I share your take on this. Imagine being able to control the weight and sensitivity of a clutch and shifter programed to work with an EV that can mimic the engine and handling characteristics of a catalogue of past vehicles.
If Ferrari could do this and make the Luca drive like everything in their history, I would be willing to accept the exterior design.
I fully recognize none of this will ever be in my price range, but it would be cool.
Manual = good. Fake = bad.
I guess it is better than nothing…
I wonder if this also has the same beneficial effects agains dementia. Or being fake brain says, not this time!