Our Two Cents: 8 of the Most Interesting Shifter Designs

If there is one feature that a car person will feel strongly about, it’s the transmission. Manual or automatic is only one way of sorting the vast array of options — you may favor one gearbox because it stands up to massive amounts of torque, another for faster-than-humanly-possible shifts, yet another for its tactile feel. For this episode of Our Two Cents, we focused on the part of the transmission assembly that you interact with most often: The shifter.

Our choices run the gamut from quirky to artistic to a classic old-school Hurst Pistol-Grip. Check out our candidates, get your thoughts flowing, and then tell us which shifter you find most interesting!

Spyker

Ferraris with gated manual shifters may get all the headlines, but the most interesting shifter I’ve ever seen in a car has to be the exposed chrome linkage in the Dutch exotic Spyker C8. The entire cabin, with its intricate switches and dials, is a wonder, but the route Spyker went to present that gear shifter almost resembles an arm stripped of all the soft bits in order to show off the functions of the radius and ulna. — Stefan Lombard

Goin’ Old-School

I prefer simplicity and feel over anything fancy. My ideal shifter would be a mishmash: A dogleg pattern like found in a Merc 190 E 2.5-16 Evo II, a short, precise throw like a Miata or S2000, and the durable-feeling heft of an aftermarket unit for a T56.

But if we’re talking about designs, it’s old-school angled Hurst with a white ball on top. Aside from Ferrari’s gated business, it’s hard to think of a shifter that’s more evocative of one corner of the hobby than Hurst’s. The long, angled lever screams driver engagement at its most mechanical. You can’t help but look at it and envision a roaring V-8, a dramatic yank, and the bark of the next gear sending tires into oblivion. — Eddy Eckart

More Woodgrain, Please!

Subtle? Uh, no, not much about my 1973 Plymouth Road Runner was under the radar, perhaps the least of which was the Hurst wood-grain, three-dot, pistol-grip shift knob (though “knob” doesn’t quite describe it) that sat atop a hefty S-shaped piece of chrome with HURST imprinted on both sides, back when that name meant sumpthin’. (Why does writing about this car make me revert to slang?) Attached at the other end of that shifter was a four-speed mated to a 400-cubic-inch V-8 topped with a Carter Thermo-Quad four-barrel carburetor, which was designed to include some plastic parts, presumably to make the damn thing easier to recycle. It had secondaries so big you could drop silver dollars down ’em. That dollar analogy is also valid, because its gas mileage was pretty much comparable to that of a Top Fuel dragster. If you squint, that shifter sort of looks like a king cobra snake, preparing to strike. Another valid analogy, the way that snake-bit drivetrain sho nuff ate clutches. — Steven Cole Smith

Silly … or Scintillating?

The whole mechanism in the Citroën Traction Avant—utterly bizarre and wonderful. Yes, the shift action and pattern seem utterly backward compared with the conventional layout. And the handle, which seems more like a lever that should make the whole car stand up on stilts or turn into a boat or maybe make kazoo noises, appears to be upside down.

The shift action becomes easy once you adjust to it, and the three-speed, which was designed specially to work with the Traction Avant’s innovative front-wheel drive, feels highly mechanical. This is the type of car you might not even bother locking, because nobody would even know how to steal it if they wanted to. — Eric Weiner

Twist, Pull, Push

Following the French theme, that’s not an umbrella handle you see sticking out the dash of the original Renault 4, it’s the shifter. There’s a conventional H-pattern for the four speeds but you select them with a twist-pull-push movement. Once you’ve done it a few times it’s pretty intuitive, though.

The Citroën 2CV has a very similar setup, except first is a dogleg, with reverse above (just where first would be on most cars). The arrangement makes your first go at parallel parking quite entertaining. — Nik Berg

Reverse, Reverse!

Pegaso, a Spanish maker of sports cars, has always been fascinating to me because its cars were both so advanced and so unusual. The shifter is a perfect example. A five-speed transaxle was cutting-edge stuff in the early 1950s, and it was also set up in a reverse dogleg pattern, which is just weird.  — Andrew Newton

Shifter Utopia?

I think the shifter from the Pagani Utopia is stunning. For me, Paganis have this way of reaching exit velocity from the weird, sort of oversaturated hypercar space. I’m normally quite tired of all the insane performance stats of this segment and the even more obscene price tags, but for some reason, I’m fascinated by pretty much every Pagani. The Utopia eschews raw performance numbers and prioritizes a pretty light curb weight (around 2800 pounds) and driving engagement.

That latter point is apparent when you look at the seven-speed manual found here. Talk about taking a single component and elevating it to the point of art. If you scooped this out from between the Utopia’s two seats and placed it in a museum of modern art, it wouldn’t look out of place one bit. — Nathan Petroelje

Two for the Price of One

The shifter in my 1985 Corvette has me captivated lately. Well, actually it’s the second shifter. The car is equipped with the Doug Nash 4+3 transmission, and while the slightly clunky, four-speed Borg-Warner has grown on me, the second shifter for the electronically controlled overdrive has me smitten. It feels absurd to be in a car so modern with an overdrive divorced from the main transmission. The whole operation is hiding in plain sight, and mine has been really fun to drive after I got it working last fall. — Kyle Smith

World’s Tiniest Gated Manual

I’m gonna go with the shifter on the Tucker 48, a four-speed wrought in miniature. If there were a contest for tiniest gated manual, this would win!

No, I haven’t had the privilege of operating it, like many of my colleagues have of experiencing their selections. Can you imagine driving one of the 47 surviving Tuckers? Honestly, the rarity would stress me out more than the value, which is also remarkable: Clear over a million, with the best-ever examples over two. Part of an auto journalist’s job is to acclimate quickly to an expensive car that doesn’t belong to you, and the safest way to drive them is to remember that, at a basic level, it’s still just a car. If you fixate on the machine’s rarity or value, you’ll distract yourself, and such distraction can be dangerous. But with that pinch ‘n’ pull shifter, could you ever forget you were driving anything other than a Tucker? — Grace Jarvis

Another American Innovator

Much like the Tucker, the Cord 812 that I reviewed was probably the most awe-inspiring shifter I have ever experienced. Both vehicles use a similar system that’s more isolating than its gated detents suggest, making it more like a push button gear selector (with a lever instead of buttons). The isolation comes from vacuum-assisted shifting, and it is truly effortless in your hand. It feels futuristic, even in these modern times.

I wager these vacuum-assisted affairs are the perfect blend of old-school gated manual transmissions and modern-day electronic transmission stalks that you must pull/push to activate the transmission. And perhaps this is a little bit of history repeating itself, as the Cord I drove was undoubtedly a fantastic performance car of the era, much like a modern EV with a column-mounted shifter stalk. And the Tucker had refinement and advancements on par with that of modern luxury vehicles from Germany with a transmission controller in the same location. — Sajeev Mehta