Subaru BRZ / Toyota 86 - really rough gearbox - is it normal?

There’s a lot of factors contributing to why cars like BRZ have virtually zero sales in Poland and thus they’re not available for test drives, rarely even available to see in person in dealership. For starters it’s not German car and like I described in other thread some time ago ( Is new Mustangs (2021) handling really this bad? - #53 by jtsanders ) everyone here is driving German cars because it just makes more sense financially and it’s more practical choice from parts availability standpoint. Also people don’t change cars here too often. Car I was previously driving stayed for 14 years in family. My dad was driving it for 12 years, then I did for 2. Also most of people can’t afford more than one car (it’s not just about car itself but also storage - we rather live in flats than homes so we have 1 garage slot per flat). So everyone kinda buys car for “everything” which they will use for years because they see car as an “investment”. Which typically results in getting some turbo diesel wagon (combi), crossover or SUV, or something like that. Thus impractical sports cars are rarity.

We have standard EU 23% VAT tax and expensive insurance (especially for young people). At the end of the day I paid around 51k usd for new BRZ Final Edition, including insurance (46k car, 5k insurance for one year). Most of young, immature and irresponsible people who could consider getting such car as their one and only car, daily driver for 365 days a year, in relatively cold climate with snow - can’t afford such car. Remaining few % don’t make up for too crazy sales. Low sales mean that such car is potentially high risk for dealership - especially considering that there’s plenty of restored salvage brz/gt86 imported from US for anything between 15 and 25 grands (already incl. tax).

Apart from that we have significantly lower wages so cars are really expensive for us. So buying new pure sports car is rare here and sales are low. Thus it’s hard to find one available for test drive. There’s plenty of dealerships but they only offer econo boxes.

At least that’s my understanding as to why pure sports cars are so rare here.

Sorry, I’m afraid I may be too young, immature and irresponsible to do that :stuck_out_tongue_closed_eyes: But I’ll try.