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
I’ve been thinking this needs to happen elsewhere for a while now. Ever since Koenigsegg started doing this with their trick gearbox, I figured this would be a way to save the manuals when done well.
The reality is, a lot of cars aren’t going to get a bespoke manual gearbox.. that’s just economics. There were critics years ago when throttle by wire arrived.. then brake by wire.. and there are some excellent “analog” enthusiast cars with those systems today. When executed correctly, I call this a win-win when you take a hard look at the reality of manuals in enthusiast cars.
Reminds me of the flappy paddles in a 2025 BMW 318d I drove for a while.
Yes you can provide imput. And perhaps this time the computer will decide to obey. But if/when it does, it might simultaneously change other things.
When trying to shift down for more engine brake, using the flappy paddles, for example downhill or coming up to a roundabout. The car would actively add power to accelerate, even if you were not applying pedal imput.
When trying to shift down under power, to get into a better rev range. It would usually ignore.
Rubbish!
Modern Ferraris are built for owners who change tires due to age, not wear.
(Except for their Nissan Leaf knockoff which will probably chew up tires at EV pace.)
This is the proper transmission for a Ferrari. Something that looks race-y, but can be left in automatic mode and driven slowly to whatever restaurant will valet park it out front.
If I’m not physically moving the gears in the transmission with the lever and feeling the bite of the clutch through the pedal, I’d rather just have paddle shifters.
I think this is brilliant. If enthusiasts legitimately want to see manuals remain available we need to get behind this type of thing. Now if we could just get in on something reasonable cause I really can’t be bothered to care about Ferrari very much anymore.
Not sure if I followed this correctly but apparently they have a automatic transmission and offer a manual transmission that despite having the ability to be as good, depending on the driver, they just offered a piece of trash?
You pay extra to get Ferrari to fake it better. On brand.
Just like the owners’ trophy wives.
Saw a 12Cilindri on the freeway the other day and immediately thought of the Ambiguously Gay Duo’s hero car.
Like with the Purosangue and Luce, fitting these controls onto a DCT feels like their way of saying, “it’s worse but you demanded this, so here [rude gesture]”
Thing is, throttle by wire sucks. I have never driven an e-throttle that can hold a candle to even an old economy car with a carburetor in throttle response. While lag is very likely down to emissions (as is rev hang), bad non-linear calibration and throttles that are fully open well before the full length of pedal travel is typical dumb programming. In the old days, long pedal travel worked as fairly effective traction control, but now we have these electronic computer crutches so nobody has to get inputs right anymore when they can market multiple driving mode options (none of which are as good as good companies got their single analog interfaces). Fuel delivery and ignition is almost always good and has been for decades because it relies on math, but anything that allows for creativity is open to bad decisions. This whole thing is creative, though the real problem I have is that fake analog is fake. Just like the dials and buttons we complain have gone, the ones we have had for a while also suck because they aren’t real mechanical switches and dials. Instead of satisfyingly commanding a metal contact that gives proper feedback to move and immediately send electrons where you want them to go, operating a “switch” today sends a request to a computer that takes its time to respond with whether it will allow the request if it even acknowledges it at all.
Preach! Had a 26 Corolla as a rental. I drive a 2010 VW (it’s fine just old. Business trip and all.) Modes. Oof. Turned everything off as it yelled constantly. Adaptive cruise can be great and bad. I’d rather not use it. Turning those off means no cruise. Blind spot? On the Washington Bridge? Gah! Throttle was pretty weird, steering was..steering. I know it’s Ferrari, but shouldn’t the driving experience be it? And not vague like a Toyota?
Back to my cloud.
When an open source ADAS is better than OEM efforts, it’s an indictment of how messed up that stuff is.
I had a Corolla loaner and it wouldn’t let me shut off all the wuss garbage. Even at the lowest setting it allowed, the emergency panic braking would flip out when a car to the right of me was taking a right turn or for phantoms or interdimensional beings who don’t show up in the spectrum visible to the human eye but were apparently right there in front of us, holy shit, don’t hit them! A big reason I bought the GR86 was the lack of active safety crap on the manuals (they later added that in). EPAS in it isn’t bad. It’s not as good as good hydraulic or manual, but better than the average ones.
I 99% agree with you. The one exception to the rull on throttle response on drive by wire setups are the early drive by wire BMWs. The e39 M5 has perfect throttle response, as it should being that it has ITBs. Also BMw e38 740s with the electronic throttles are perfectly instantaneous in response. That said, all others have lag and many have rev hang, (I am looking at you 8th Gen Civic Si.)
The gold standard for throttle response in my book is my Austin Healey Sprite with twin SU carbs. Everyone who drives it is caught off guard with how responsive it is.
I couldn’t agree more, I’ve never driven a DBW car that wasn’t frustrating long-term. My wife’s first-generation CR-V and its 4-speed slushbox are a million times more interactive than the paddle shifters in the M235i I once owned, and even though the throttle response was quick due to the valvetronic system, I’ve heard plenty of complaints about the N55’s behavior when mated to a manual, even in the M2’s sharper state of tune.
And drive modes suck, I’m glad to be back in a cable-throttle, fixed-ratio hydraulic-steering manual devoid of traction control after my stint in DBW cars. Cable throttles are my biggest motivation to want a Japanese car when I start needing back seats, because they adopted DBW just a little slower than the Germans. Even the 2.slow Golf was DBW after 2002, with the 1.8T losing its cable in 1999, but you could get a cable-actuated Civic Si until 2005. Not a huge difference, but the early 2000s saw a lot of technological change, especially in safety, that I’d like to have access to without giving my engine’s most basic control away to a disobedient computer.
Maybe on the newer stuff? I think this has been done this way by the OE more recently on purpose for whatever reason I don’t know. I’ve owned 3 cars with throttle by wire: ’00 BMW 323i, ’05 Legacy GT, and ’08 Cayenne S. Especially the Subaru and Cayenne had no more lag I could tell than an older cable actuated car, I’d assumed the Subaru had an analog throttle until I popped the hood. And even the BMW was never bad enough to annoy me-and I’ve owned two other BMWs with cable actuated throttles for comparison. And just to play devil’s advocate, when I had my ’88 Trans Am it had annoyingly stiff initial throttle opening that made it heard to gently roll into throttle. I swear it was designed to make it easy to accidentally chirp the tires and just generally make the car feel faster than it actually was.
All that being said I largely agree with you and the kids should get off our collective lawn.
Were they manuals? I’ve found TCs can do a decent job of masking the issue. A few cars were bad enough to resemble an old worn points ignition off the line, but for the rest, lag might not be the best word so much as an unsatisfying lack of urgency in response. It’s like there’s something always between the driver’s input and car’s output (which there is, but I don’t want to feel it). While I never drove the 4th gen Legacy GT, the other E-throttle Subarus I’ve driven all had that slight delay, even my GR86.
My Legacy GT is a stick and replaced an ’83 BMW 533i and it hasn’t bugged me enough to notice vs the older car, but now I’m going to pay more attention lol. I will note my wife has a ’15 Legacy w the CVT and not sure how much to attribute to the transmission vs the throttle but it does feel mushy and at times uneven in power delivery if you’re trying to drive it hard, driven like a typical subaru driver it seems fine outside of the weirdly light pedal, but the brakes and steering are the same so I guess at least it has a cohesive feel to it unlike the ’15 WRX I test drove before buying my wagon.
The BMW was a stick and ironically was noticeably harder to drive smoothly than either of my ’80s BMWs, not sure how much of that was throttle vs dual mass flywheel, clutch delay valves etc, but the e46 was my least favorite of the three, better daily but lacked the sharpness and sense of liveliness the earlier cars had and thinking about it I do think part of that was that lag when you cracked the throttle. The Cayenne was an auto and at least in sport mode (which noticeably sharpened throttle response) was quite responsive that I recall. But that’s also a Porsche so you’d kind of hope it was dialed in better than the typical car.
Still less stupid than the Taycan fake gearbox and sounds.
I don’t even know what models Ferrari is producing right now.
They’re not even aspirational for me anymore. Just a big pile of Do Not Want.
One nice application for this is to get a realistic car for training future manual transmission drivers (in a much cheaper car, of course).
Ew. It’s the automotive equivalent of a Fleshlight.
Yep. It’s like spending 6+ figures on the most realistic and anatomically correct sex doll. Like a decent used Miata, the real thing is MUCH cheaper.
Oh yeah, you are both right on!
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.
Yep, at the end of the day it is easier to manualize an automatic than to automatize a manual.
It has all the appeal of a rear view camera instead of a mirror. Nobody is cross shopping this with any kind of daily
Exactly this – when done well, this could absolutely keep manuals alive in things like the GTI, S3, and various AMG and M cars.
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?
The 456 is perhaps one of the most underrated Ferraris ever made.
Baffling, that. Certainly not underrated by me. The last one I have the slightest interest in.
I must have watched that bootlegged, 240p Top Gear video of the 456 get thrashed on track until it explodes hundreds of times.
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.
Still 300 million give or take 😛
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
I guess the test of whether you’re right or I am is the demand for these, both new and resold. Right now true manual Ferraris and Lambos command huge premiums over autos/F1s. Will that be the case for “fake” manuals like this? My guess is no, or not to enough of an extent that developing a “real” manual wasn’t a missed opportunity. I could be wrong though!
We’re also kind of deep into the game-ification of Ferrari releases. I’m not sure about the long term value for a lot of their models atm. No one is going to give an extra crap about the “new” Testarossa, for example. I’m not sure what I’d consider a W here, but perhaps if each new generation gets at least one run of simulated manual (either a “junior” or “senior” model) then it’s at least moderately successful
Their buyers do not actually want a manual, but they feel like they should want a manual – or at least they feel pressured into pretending they want a manual.
This is the proper solution for Ferrari’s current customer base. To be honest, they spent way too much development time. The could have just put an up/down radio volume control that looks like a gated shifter. The volume shifter would get more use than this will.
The fact that a gated 6 speed F430 or 599 costs double to triple what an automatic goes for makes me think that many of them actually do want a manual.
There is often a stronger interest in manual transmissions in the used market. If I ever see a reasonably priced 911, it is an automatic and sold at a discount versus the three pedal version.
I would guess that rarity counts in a collector car, and just by being the less popular option those cars are more valuable.
Besides, a gated shifter looks infinitely cooler than a couple of transmission buttons on the console.
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?
I mean, Ferrari have always done variations of this
456 – each cylinder is 456cc
308 – 3.0L V8
355 – 3.5L, 5 valves per cylinder
250 – each cylinder is 250cc
F8 Tributo – Ferrari tribute to the V8
F40 – Ferraris 40th anniversary
LaFerrari, because there’s Ferrari in your Ferrari?
How many 3.0 V8 sports cars had Ferrari produced before they named the 308?
On the other hand, they’ve been pumping out 12 cylinder cars for decades. They may as well have named this the Quattro Ruota because it has four wheels.
What about the F8 and the F12? Both name after cylinder count.
I’d argue the 812 Superfast is a worse name. 800ps + 12 cylinders and they just rammed Superfast into it because it sounds super fast, just like the original 500 Superfast, which in itself was a submodel of the Ferrari America, which was built for, you guessed it, North America.
I think I may have stopped caring before those cars.
I think I completely lost interest around the time of the Enzo. There was a bit of time where their sports cars seemed to follow a little bit of a naming convention (355, 360, 430) then they dropped the best car ever as the Enzo. Then they made their fastest car that was the 599? FXX? 612? Scaglietti? Scuderia? Trofeo? They had been making mid/rear cars for decades but now their fast car was f/r.
I was an adult with the ability to buy real cars. I didn’t spend any real time playing Gran Turismo or Forza. I had no real reason to follow Ferrari’s stupid naming of the week since it had zero real or virtual relevance.
I also think it was around the time that I was merging onto the highway behind a 308, and got on it just so I could stay close enough to hear the exhaust (he definitely got on it). Then I had to brake in my Miata to keep from running into his backside.
Not a turbo Miata. Not a V8 Miata. Just a mostly stock Miata.
At the time, the 308 / 328 was pretty much the only Ferrari dipping into my reasonable price range. Ferrari requires an engine-out service every 10k miles or so. I could replace the Miata’s drivetrain for $1500 in a weekend. The engineer in me could no longer make any sense of owning an F car.
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.
Yeah, in this age and day a real manual is a downgrade. Now you can get the downgrade and also keep the upside.
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.
Or maybe even more prosaic but still fun ideas, like “shifting” through different power circuits, or something similar to IndyCar where you have a certain amount of boost that can de deployed, just here, it’d have to recharge. I’m sure there could be something else that’s left foot activated or engaged.
left-foot e-brake engagement.
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!
Driving this will make you feel like you’re staving off dementia though you aren’t.