Scotty Kilmer is an almost half-century veteran of the car repair business. (He's become the new Car Talk of 20-teens YouTube.) His position on the automatic transmissions made by most car companies, in the current fleet of used cars, is that they're a bit crappy. As in, you're a bit lucky to get 100k out of most of them trouble free, and you're very lucky to get 200k trouble free. One of the few makers of automatic transmissions that gets it right is Aisin, which is the supplier to Toyota.

One way this might change, is the use of computers to operate what's essentially a manual transmission on behalf of the driver. However, even that might fall by the wayside, outside of particular niches, with electric vehicles.