The manual transmission should remain standard equipment on all Corollas or in this case be available for those of us who can drive manuals and not for a cost cutting transmission being forced upon us
Unfortunately, the North-American market makes this a hard business case. With the gradual domination of automatics, the manual became the cheaper but efficient option. But the CVT eventually beat it on those aspects.
So the only profitable niche that remains for manual is as part of added value performance package. With a take-rate of 1% for manual in regular Corolla, the lack of scale economies would force a too high price, or a loss, on what is after all the entry level Toyota model for North America.
The manual has been catch in a spiral of offer and demand, aka as capitalism.
