You sit down in the driver’s seat of your car, push the start button, and then reach for the gear lever. Except it’s not there. The console has ten cup holders and three phone charging ports, but no gear shift. Nothing above it on the dash either: that’s also lever-lackin’. Upon the column like an old school pickup? Nope.
There was a time when shifting gears was one of the most fundamental parts of driving. You reached for a lever, moved it into position, and felt a mechanical connection between your hand and the machinery responsible for making the car move. Whether you drove a three-on-the-tree sedan, a four-speed muscle car, or a truck with a modern automatic, there was a lever involved in changing gears.
Then automakers decided that shifting gears was probably too much work.
Today’s vehicles increasingly replace conventional gear selectors with things that are decidedly not gear selectors. Rotary knobs, push buttons, electronic switches, touchscreen menus, and all manner of non-levers are now in vogue.
The question is simple: What happened to gear shifts, and why did automakers decide that one of the most recognizable controls in an automobile needed reinventing?
From Mechanical Necessity to Electronic Suggestion
Early automobiles required direct mechanical connections between the driver’s controls and the transmission. Whether automatic or manual, gearboxes used levers and linkages to move internal components into position to make the vehicle drive. The gear lever was a functional necessity.
As automatic transmissions became more common in the 1960s, the familiar PRND (Park, Reverse, Neutral, Drive) arrangement became standard. Whether mounted on the steering column or the center console, the selector offered a straightforward interface with an obvious purpose. And it was usually physically connected to what it was doing in the transmission.
The mechanical connection also provided useful feedback. Moving a lever into Drive felt different from selecting Reverse or Park. The driver could often determine the selected gear by feel without looking down at the shifter.
Msst recently, however, electronic controls began replacing mechanical linkages. Known as shift-by-wire, these systems communicate the driver’s selection electronically rather than relying on a direct physical connection between the selector and transmission. By the 2010s this was the norm in consumer vehicles and the disconnection between driver and machine began in earnest.
This technology offered automakers more freedom in where and how they placed gear controls. It also opened the door to an increasingly strange assortment of alternatives. With the advent of increasingly smartphone-on-wheels designs, making the gear shift a radical part of design is now all the rage.
The Great Shifter Disappearance
Once a conventional mechanical linkage was no longer necessary, designers gained considerable freedom. A rotary dial could perform the same function as a traditional lever. A collection of buttons could accomplish the same task. A small electronic toggle could select Drive or Reverse without occupying much space.
Some manufacturers embraced the change enthusiastically.
Jaguar Land Rover became particularly associated with rotary gear selectors, including the rising dial used in certain Jaguar and Land Rover models. Chrysler experimented with rotary selectors in vehicles such as the Ram 1500 (quickly finding out that many truck owners hate them), while Ford and other manufacturers introduced electronic switches and compact selectors across portions of their lineups. Honda famously went to push buttons that were immediately compared to the (questionable, short-lived) push-button shifting American Motors used in the 1950s.
Mercedes-Benz moved many gear selectors to a steering-column stalk, freeing space on the center console. Not wanting to be left behind, Hyundai did the same, but with bulkier shifters located down low on the column. Others kept a traditional-appearing shifter, but made it barely move and difficult to shift into neutral (Nissan) or manual control (Subaru).
The reasoning isn’t entirely unreasonable. A conventional shifter can consume valuable cabin space, particularly in vehicles with complex center consoles. Replacing it with a dial or switch can free room for storage, cupholders, charging pads, and other amenities.
Electronic selectors can also reduce the number of mechanical components required between the cabin and transmission.
But there is a difference between making a control smaller and making it better.
A conventional lever communicates something to the driver through its position and movement. A rotary dial or momentary switch often depends on a display or indicator to communicate the selected gear. The control becomes less self-explanatory, and the driver may need to look down to confirm what the vehicle is doing.
That isn’t necessarily a deal-breaker, but it raises an obvious question: What problem was the new design solving for the person behind the wheel? This question often goes unanswered.
Cars Have More Stuff, and That Stuff Has To Fit Somewhere
Automotive interiors have become battlegrounds for designers seeking to make each new model feel more modern than the last. Large screens, minimalist dashboards, floating center consoles, and increasingly elaborate ambient lighting have become selling points. Traditional physical controls can appear old-fashioned in comparison.
And despite design trends toward “minimalism” in vehicle cabins, prospective buyers are expecting more. We want cup holders capable of increasingly large volumes. We want phone chargers so we don’t have to plug anything in. We want a place to put a purse. An extra drink. Our miscellaneous devices. Car keys. A picture of grandma.
Despite design trends pushing toward minimalism, American car buyers are anything but minimal with the amount of stuff we expect to fit in our cars. A current, full-sized pickup truck will have no fewer than six drink holders within the driver’s reach. Because that’s what focus groups demand. Holes in the center console for a purse? Yep, also demanded in most SUVs and minivans. Two or more wireless phone chargers? Also requested. Set-and-forget climate controls? Thumbs up there too. Plugs for dash cams, a place for the air freshener that isn’t the rearview, a way to get into the center storage bin from at least four of the vehicle’s seating positions, six ways to put… You get the idea. We want a lot. While being minimal. Because that aesthetic is in.
So the conventional gear lever became an option that could be eliminated to make more space for other stuff, while achieving a minimalist look. And so the gear shift… Well, shifted to somewhere else.
Some of the alternatives make no sense whatsoever.
- Honda went from a moving gear lever to a set of buttons that take up the exact same amount of room in the same place a gear shift used to be. Nothing gained but “I pull what for reverse now?” confusion.
- Ram went to rotary dials that did nothing but blank out the space where the lever had been on the steering column. Then people started shifting gears instead of turning up the radio… Oops.
- Hyundai’s gigantic box on the bottom-right of the steering wheel freed up space on the console for an extra charging station, but at the expense of drivers having to crane down to see the gear shift and then worry the whole time that they’re going to knee bump it out of gear.
- Volkswagen tried putting it on a rotary knob on a bullhorn above the steering wheel, where nobody would look for it.
- Chevrolet fiddled with a couple of ideas, except in pickup trucks, where it was left on the column because truck owners don’t want any mamby-pamby crap in their trucks. Unless it’s heated, massaging seats, of course.
The problem isn’t that electronic shifters are inherently bad. It’s that automakers sometimes appear to treat novelty as an improvement in itself. A control that performs the same task in a less intuitive way hasn’t necessarily advanced automotive technology. It may simply have changed the shape of the inconvenience.
Electric Vehicles Also Changed the Equation
Much of the more recent change has come thanks to electric vehicles accelerating the transformation.
Most battery-electric vehicles don’t use conventional multi-gear transmissions. Their electric motors can deliver useful torque across a broad operating range, allowing many EVs to operate with a single fixed reduction gear rather than the multiple forward ratios common in gasoline-powered vehicles.
Drivers still need to select Park, Reverse, Neutral, and Drive, but there is less reason to retain a traditional transmission selector designed around a conventional automatic gearbox.
Add in that many EVs have been just experimental smartphones with wheels, and things get even dicier. Early adopters of a new technology are usually happy to accept all kinds of radical changes and inconveniences for the privilege of being first. And so gear shifters got radicalized in electric cars.
Some EVs use steering-column stalks. Others employ center-console switches, small toggles, or touchscreen controls. The absence of a conventional transmission also gives designers more freedom when arranging the cabin. Things could be sleeker, thinner, lower, and above all.. Whiter. Every early EV seemed to have a white interior with a complete absence of useful buttons or switches. Giant TV-sized screens dominated the interior instead.
However, electrification doesn’t automatically justify every unusual design. An EV still needs a clear, accessible way to select a direction of travel. The motor may be simpler than a conventional powertrain, but the driver’s task remains fundamentally the same: choose where the vehicle should go.
Slowly, as EVs gained mainstream appeal, those “old school” controls began to return. Today, the best-selling electrics for any given carmaker are usually the ones that are cars that happen to be electric rather than being electric for EV sake.
Will the Traditional Gear Lever Return?
Probably not everywhere, but it isn’t disappearing entirely. In fact, it’s making a bit of a comeback. It’s the traditional manual transmission that is becoming rarer than an uncirculated wheat penny. Among automatic vehicles, some manufacturers retain conventional-looking selectors because customers understand them and find them comfortable to use. And a few of those manufacturers who deviated are coming back to them.
The likely future is a mixture of approaches. Electronic shift-by-wire technology will remain in nearly all vehicles because it offers packaging flexibility and integrates readily with modern vehicle electronics. And is less likely to break. EVs will likely continue to use compact selectors, while performance cars and pickup trucks may preserve more traditional controls where they contribute to driver engagement.
The important distinction is between modernizing a control and needlessly complicating it.
Perhaps that’s what the industry has forgotten: The best automotive controls aren’t always the newest or the smallest. They’re the ones that do their jobs so well that the driver barely has to think about them.
Sources
RELATED:
The post What the Heck Happened To Regular Gear Shifts? appeared first on Family Handyman.
Article source here:
What the Heck Happened To Regular Gear Shifts?
