Aston Martin recently released press photos of the new 2019 Vantage that showed off some lovely paint and interior color options. The bright green launch color is officially known as Lime Essence, and the automaker featured the car in Tungsten Silver and Onyx Black, too. The released images featured the new Vantage in dozens of angles, both inside and out, but something was missing: a promised manual transmission. Every image shows a shifter for the car's eight-speed automatic transmission. We wanted to find out why.

Aston Martin CEO Andy Palmer promised to be the last manufacturer to offer a manual transmission, and to always have at least one in the lineup. As of now, the company has not lived up to that promise. Matthew Clarke, Marketing & Communications Manager for Aston Martin North America, told CarBuzz that Aston Martin is "on record as saying a manual version of the new Vantage is in our plans," but broke the bad news that "at this stage it is at least 12 months away." Better late than never. Mr. Clarke didn't specify whether the 12 months included the time it would take to actually build the manual cars and deliver them to customers, meaning the wait could be even longer.

The Vantage is powered by a Mercedes-AMG-sourced 4.0-liter twin-turbo V8, which is currently only available with an automatic transmission. Aston Martin likely has a lot of engineering to do to get the engine to play nice with the rumored seven-speed manual transmission, so we can understand why it is taking so long.