Geraldine Herbert

It's not that consumers are making the choice.

They're just not being offered it.

It's very, very hard to buy a manual car at the moment.

I know from testing them, I actually have to think twice when I get a manual.

I go, God, it's a manual car.

Never get them to drive anymore.

Yeah, anyway, the enquiries on, if you're looking at automatics versus manuals, you can go on Done Deal or any of these websites, CarZone, and you can see the change is happening before your eyes.

Now the cost of running a car, if you decide we have two cars in our house, we're going to give up one, how much would we save?

Okay, so updating, this was the, Out Insurance did a survey last year and they found it was 10,300.

It's gone up to about 10,500 at the moment a year to run a car.

Now they looked at a 1.6 litre Hyundai Tucson, fairly standard car, very popular car in Ireland.

So 10,500 to run it.

Obviously that could even get higher if fuel prices go up more.

So in a two car household, you could be spending 20,000.

The interesting thing is, though, if you get rid of one car, you're not going to save 10,000.

Because remember, depreciation is factored into that and people don't spend the money on depreciation on a weekly basis.

It doesn't come out of your household budget.

So you might be disappointed to discover that if you give up a car, you might only save 4,000.

Now, 4,000 is a lot of money, but it takes a lot of effort.

I think that's what came out.