When you get into a car with an automatic transmission, you expect pretty simple and easy operation. I mean, you click on your seat belt, start the vehicle, then slide the lever into the desired gear. That’s easy! Well, some automakers have decided to change how your vehicle gets into gear and it gets real funky sometimes.
Now, there have been different ways to get a car into gear for about as long as the car itself has been around. There was a time when a push-button automatic transmission was a luxurious option. Old Chrysler push-button automatics were still mechanical as the buttons moved corresponding cables, getting your car into gear. Even large commercial vehicles have push-button transmissions. The top photo of this COTD is the ZF push-button five-speed automatic that’s in my 2002 RTS-06 transit bus. Every time I hit those buttons I have this fear that the required communications won’t reach their destinations and thus, my bus won’t go into or out of gear. Those buttons aren’t actually connected to the transmission!
Anyway, today we asked you about an annoying feature in a car you love. Normally, I don’t nominate answers to questions for COTD, but this was too good from Bizness Comma Nunya:
Push button shifters, all of them, are bad. Rotary knobs are a little better, but still not great.
I can’t believe I’m one of these people now, and only because I own a Hyundai with its push button shifter… but just give me the damn lever back please. I don’t give a shit that it’s shift by wire and the lever is a glorified switch anyway, it works, everyone knows it, and it’s intuative without looking at it for k-turns/parking, etc…
Toyota knew their core audience on the all-hybrid sienna to not fix what’s not broken and they did a regular shifter lever.
Extra points for any car maker brining back column shifters, which are superior to console shifters for automatics.
I’ve hit park a few times on the Hyundai and it didn’t register because I didn’t push hard enough and almost caused a small incident… that has happened exactly zero times when slamming a lever in park…
This managed to get a response from resident goth, Adrian!
There’s a lot to be said for established heuristics in car design, and they are often overlooked in favour of a solution looking for a problem. My RR Sport was a late facelift and had the pop up rotary gear selector, and while the theatre of it was fun it was surprisingly unintuitive. I often selected the wrong gear or none at all. Interestingly JLR have ditched it now in favour of a more traditional style selector.
Sometimes, I test out shifters by putting my wife, a non-car journalist, into one of these vehicles and letting her take a spin. When I put her in a Volkswagen ID.4 (above), she stared at the shift dial as if it were a piece of alien tech. In the grand scheme of things, these shifters probably aren’t the biggest deal, but they often aren’t intuitive. Getting your car into gear shouldn’t take research!
Have a great evening, everyone.
My Lincoln has a vertical strip of buttons that go P-R-N-D-S. My six year old was able to figure out what all the buttons mean just by asking what the letters stand for and seeing what button is lit up at what time.
The problem isn’t so much lever, vs, button vs dial. It’s lack of standardization in how they operate. While some still follow the classic PRNDL layout others have eschewed it in favor of other ideas. My wife’s (as of yesterday) former Volvo XC40 had a lovely little lever in the center console. Push forward once for reverse. Pull back once for neutral. Pull a second time for Drive. Push the P button next to the lever for Park.
Uh WTF?
BMW. From Park. Press unlock button. Push lever forward once for Neutral. Push second time for Reverse. Pull back twice for Drive.
To place back in Park, press Park button on top of Lever.
Uh WTF?
Two different manufacturers, two different methods of operation.
I’m completely the opposite: give me the damn buttons. I’d much rather have discrete controls that I know were activated or not over the increasing prevalence of these rocking back and forth ZF shifters. It was by far the most annoying part of my B9 Audi A4. Often times I’d find myself in neutral when trying to do a 3 point turn because the threshold between pushing the shifter along its 1″ of travel didn’t respond consistently to the same inputs. In the 6 months I had it, I had to look down and check after every shift to make sure it was where I thought it was.
An old PRNDL is also better than this and can be operated blindly, but if I only need to touch a shifter maybe 3 times per drive, I’d rather have it in the dash/behind the column and out of the way to get all that wasted center console space back
I dunno what the right answer is to “best auto shifter design” because they all have pros and cons. (My personal vehicle experiences were a 2005 Ford Focus, 2010 Ford Flex, 1997 Ford Econoline, and 2012 Toyota Prius v.) I’ve grown to like the Prius more than I expected, although I never had any issues with the others either.
While the Focus was probably the “simplest” design of them, I also see how it could be “risky” if it’s a true mechanical connection means one could shift into reverse when trying to shift into neutral if you’re not careful.
I’ve seen the Allison push-button transmissions on the buses my university had, and I’d love to experience those in practice, because I like the idea, but I dunno how that works in theory vs. execution.
<insert “thank you!” gif of your choice>
The federal government mandated the PRNDL order for transmission selectors over 50 years ago b/c automakers were getting cute with their selectors. It seemed to hold steady until the past 8-10 years when automakers like Mercedes inexplicably made their transmission selector a turn signal stalk….Audi now has a weird one, too. I don’t get it. You can go directly into reverse or park using buttons and that was specifically what the federal mandate was seeking to avoid. It infuriates me when I get into my mom’s Q5 and I need to take extra time to make sure I don’t cause a fatality just doing parking lot maneuvers.
I have a 2020 Grand Cherokee and my wife has a 2018 Ford Explorer and we’re both thankful we have traditional selectors. On the column would be better, but we’ll take what we can get these days.
Not only just annoying but occasionally fatal. R.I.P. Anton Yelchin.
I rented one of the grand cherokees with that shifter and I could see how that happened, especially before they did the recall to force these FCA products to auto select park.
Just the other day I was talking about how I do like the push button selectors on my Hyundai because they’re out of the way. I don’t think there is any point in having a lever when everything is digital anyway. I have had moments of hitting a wrong button, or the not hitting it at the right time, and I’ve angrily beat on the buttons to get into gear a couple of times when it didn’t go the first time. Now that I see that I’m in the minority of liking the buttons, I also realize that I don’t really like them that much. I think it beats a huge shifter but having a smaller shifter that I can flick into position would probably be much better. So I guess I really don’t love the buttons at all, but with patience have learned to enjoy them. Oh and sometimes the sun catches them and they sear my retinas cause they’re shiny.
Honestly, now I just hit the “ignition” start/stop button for the car instead of park. It automatically selects park, takes out another step, and it’s slightly more obvious because you are looking at it forwards instead of looking down and to the right. Don’t love it, but it works slightly better for me vs. hitting park then ignition.
My daily driver (Ford BA Fairlane Ghia) and my Hiace work van have ‘regular’ auto shift levers. My 1962 Valiant has a pushbutton shifter, but I am OK with that because it’s cool and nobody else is ever going to get to drive it anyway. My ‘phantom’ AP5 Valiant ute will probably get pushbuttons too, since I have dashboard frames both with and without the mounting cutout for the shifter. I even tracked down a pushbutton shifter-compatible V8 gearbox (hard to find in Australia) so I still have the option of pushbuttons if I go V8.
But the 2 Peugeot vans our other technicians drive (1 x Partner and 1 x Expert) both have stupid dial shifters. The first time I got in one to move it out of our driveway I turned the dial to R without my foot on the brake, and I had to cycle the ignition off/on a couple of times before it stopped flashing stupid warnings on the dash and actually did what it was told.
The ONLY one who has electronic shifters right is ZF, the stick in the BMW, Audi, JLR, Alfa Romeo and Peugeot is perfect. Pull back for drive. Push forward for reverse and press a button for park. I hate the Tesla/Mercedes stalk (whilst it’s great from a space perspective there is nothing to differentiate it from the wiper or indicator stalk). My friend has a Jaguar I-pace which has buttons and it’s so easy to forget which one is where, I’ve noticed he looks down every time. I really don’t like BMW and VWs new toggle switch, but that’s just aesthetics
But the Tesla is a column shifter! Yeah, I don’t love it but I put my pro car buddy in it (first time in an EV) and he was driving before I could tell him what to do. It is pretty intuitive to back up or drive. Not so much to park!
Old bus start knobs ! Late 70s early 80s. You write the best bass guitars articles and show pics of guitars?
My son and I were just discussing the different shift control mechanisms that I have and that I do indeed try to grab, twist or push in the wrong place. I’ve got column and console levers, push buttons, a dial and my pickup has a manual. I’d give a slight edge to the dial over the buttons while my preference on column vs console really depending on the application.
The dial in my Ram truck is kinda annoying. I’ll take a column or console shifter, please.
PREACH. All of these things waste my time over just giving me a normal shifter.
Same goes with hiding the start button. Like, why is it all over the place on so many cars? It was cute when the SLR did the little flip-up pew-pew button on the gearshift, but it’s just exhausting nowadays. Like, it takes me a minute in a Range Rover to remember that it’s way the hell up on the dash, or that Rollses follow Porsche’s right-of-wheel position. Like, don’t mess with Porsche, but at least it’s in that usual steering-column-adjacent area where buttons and keys usually go. If the start button is not on the same kind of horizontal plane as the steering column, you’re trying to be too cutesy and it’s time to stop. Adding the start button as like, just one among a few random buttons on the console is beyond the pale, and I’m sick of it. It’s a start button, not a frickin’ Easter egg. All of this crap should be standardized by now!
Funny enough, people also lost their collective shit when Microsoft hide the damn start button in Windows 8. Companies like to add learning curve where they aren’t needed, like they are sponsored by them or something.
Yeah. Like, I know I’d get used to it if I daily drove a car with a weird start button location, but it’s just so unexpectedly annoying. Like they want you to start off annoyed because it’s 104 outside, you’re sitting in a hot car and you have no idea where THIS model put the on button.
EXISTING IS ANNOYING ENOUGH RIGHT NOW! I don’t need this extra frustration.
That hit me right in the feels.
I can understand thinking you will eventually get used to one of these bad ideas on a test drive, but I have had some for week long vacation rentals and they just don’t work intuitively. The Mustang Ecoboost shifter is good, Durango is ok, Suburban and Expedition are bad and the Prius thingybop is sadly horrible. The reason I am sad about the Prius is that it’s so close to the right location (as demonstrated by the Alfa Spider) but completely wrong in use.
I get a bit annoyed by people describing designs that are deeply unintuitive, but familiar, as intuitive.
There’s nothing at all intuitive about a PRNDL lever, it’s just familiar.
If there was a representation of a car, and you pushed it forward for D, backwards for R, and down for P, that could arguably be described as intuitive. If someone had never seen a car with a modern automatic it would take them ages to figure out what that lever was for, and even how to make it go, “wait, I have to put my foot on that pedal before the lever will do anything, WTF!”. “D for forward? Who are these idiots!”.
I’m in the UK and didn’t drive an auto until I was in my 30’s. There is nothing intuitive about the classic PRNDL shifter.
In a manual I park in neutral, why is there a park gear? That’s what the handbrake is for.
Why is there even a neutral? It’ll stop in D or R.
WTF is L for?
Intuitive would have been a big lever that’s either in forward or reverse.
I know why there are park and neutral now, obviously, because I’m an engineer and read the manual so I could find mistakes and feel superior. Neutral is for revving the engine while cruising past pedestrians I want to impress, and park is so I can let my emergency braking system seize solid.
In america for some bizarre reason the handbrake/parking brake (many are foot-operated) is referred to as, and used as, an emergency brake. Like, people never use it, don’t use it when parked, etc. It’s bizarre.
I think some of that is having to do with mainstream folks who do not take care of their cars. The e-brake (see I did it) cable will rust up and stick if not taken care of. All it takes is for that to happen to a few folks and it magically becomes lore “If you put on the e-brake it will stick”.
All it takes is for that to happen to a few folks…
Or literally every car you’ve ever owned at one point or another.
Around these parts there is a 1000% chance that if you use the parking brake it will seize, and you will spend the next week of your life sniffing PB Blaster and beating things with a mallet.
Yeah, it’s illegal not to use it. It’s good for safety for good reasons (not like all these other safety nannies)
Neutral is always good to have when car is broken/pushing it. Park is good to have as a secondary (well, I guess the handbrake would be secondary but some people don’t even use it even though it’s illegal)
Either way, yeah stick is better
It’s so you can’t go from D straight to R (or vice versa), and given parking lots in the US encourage parking nose in, going from P to R makes sense as well.
Some places will even ticket you if you reverse into the spot. Supposedly so that the poor parking enforcers won’t have to walk around your car to read the registration tag. Miserable country.
Spot when Adrian is in the US. He’s the one idiot who reversed into the parking space.
You should come to Seattle. We have tons of “back in angle parking only” spots for your enjoyment, and you can even get a ticket for NOT backing into them!
I absolutely love the column shift in my 99 Oldsmobile Eighty Eight. The only issue it gives me is sometimes it won’t quite be in reverse and actually be in neutral even though the digital indicator shows reverse. It’s very mechanical, feels great, and I can blindly grab it and get it into a gear quickly. Every person that’s ever driven it knew exactly how to operate it too, no questions asked.
I find the rotary knobs annoying, they don’t have enough feedback and you have to stare at them and concentrate on actually seeing what gear they go in.
As long as there’s no mechanical connection to the transmission anyway, A smart transmission maker could just give you a joystick and give you the options of H patterns, sequential, H plus splitters or range shifter, or just forget it and let it shift itself. My TDI with the DSG transmission gives me some of these options with the paddle shifters as well as the usual sequential pattern, can you image what fun the Cummins-Eaton Endurant XT 18 speed automated manual would be with joystick(s) shifting!
How many celebrities have to die before automakers stop messing with pointless shifter redesigns?
7
I will never have this problem. (So help me me manual gods!)
Don’t ever buy a dogleg box 🙂
The Mondial is a dogleg box and it STILL occasionally catches me out.
I would like a column shifted dogleg transmission – has there ever been one?
I bet the old military trucks had them.
Finding reverse in a new to you manual is always fun.
Accidentally finding reverse in a new to you manual while driving is even more fun.
Management: “Let’s do something different with our shifter!”
Design team: “Here you go… this is a completely new idea!”
Management: “Yay!”
Customers: “Oh my god, nobody has ever done something so fucking stupid before!”
Management: Yay, we’re different!”
Are we talking about Apple or Tesla here?
Marketing: Customers want a console with inductive charger, 4 large cupholders, 3 USB ports, and a 16″ LCD touchscreen.
Engineering: We can ony do that if we eliminate the large shifter
Management: Make it so, and make it shiny.
Engineering: I saw this thing on Star Trek. We’ll do that.
I had a 1975 Cutlass with a center console shift lever for the automatic transmission. When the cable snapped between the shift lever and transmission, I discovered that there was a collar around the steering column where a column shifter would have been mounted (presumably in other models). Oddly, it was connected to the transmission. I spent a few years grabbing that collar with both hands and counting clicks to put it in the correct gear. (Even though it had transmission linkage, it wasn’t connected to a gear indicator.)
No one ever asked to borrow that car more than once.
Yes the column is the same without the boss for the lever and it connects with the same rod to the transmission. It was done because of the law that required the shift interlock that prevents locking the column if the car isn’t in Park. I used that same trick for my Collonade when its cable broke.
What’s most baffling to me is that someone a) tried out a car to see if they liked it, b) didn’t, and c) bought it. Learn to walk away, people!
I’ve definitely tried things and thought I would get used to them. It’s tough to always know what will stay frustrating in just a test drive.
I much prefer column shift for autos, and there’s no questions about its intuitiveness. Park is park. Except when the shift cable broke in my ‘99 K2500. Which was fun.
Column shift is ideal, and I think the rotary shift is relatively intuitive (as long as there is no similar knob too nearby). Buttons are fine if they are carefully crafted and located. Don’t put them anywhere a person might be looking to press another button or anywhere something could fall on or be placed on them.
The problem is that manufacturers are messing these basic things up. Shifter and drive mode selector too close. Buttons on the center console or right beside the infotainment rather than away from the stereo on the dash. Poor labeling and counterintuitive shapes. Differences across the lineup that mean you could test drive three models from one brand and find three entirely different control schemes.
I complained about my 23 Sierra not having 12v outlets, but it has a column shifter to compensate!
If I remember right, the id.4 also has an optical illusion on the shifter that makes it look like it could move in either direction to get the same result.