Carmakers Are Reinventing the Gear Shifter and Drivers Are Lost | Hacker News Reader

Carmakers Are Reinventing the Gear Shifter and Drivers Are Lost

wsj.com

13 pointsSirLJ8 comments

I also hate it. Car makers have collectively lost their mind chasing form over function (safety) the last 15 years.

The shifter change is a form follows function thing though.

The function is the system shifts into park (and engages the parking brake) automatically when the vehicle is turned off or the driver's door is opened. This is generally good for safety. But it means that either the shift lever has to be stateless, or the shift lever has to be movable by the system. It was easy for the system to move the shift lever in Knight Rider, cause it was TV; in reality, it's easier to make the shift lever stateless. The rotating knobs are pretty clever: they don't seem stateless because you have to push to move in certain directions and you hit what feels like hard stops, but if your 12v battery dies, you'll find you can twist it as much as you like and when you get 12v again, it doesn't matter how you twisted it, you'll start in Park. The other levers are more obviously stateless.

Of course, it becomes harder to get into neutral when your car isn't working. And sometimes it takes a bit to figure out how to use the thing.

I drive different cars often (rentals, friends, family) and I have no clue how to change gears initially and it takes a lot of time to learn each new car. In the past, it was always the same mostly.

I really liked the Tesla virtual gear shift stalk. I used to drive old cars (such as an early-80s Cadillac) that had a real gear shift stalk, and making that stateless--with multiple pushes to change to a gear--felt quite intuitive in a reasonably-backwards-compatible manner. (Of course, Tesla has removed that stalk, and now has multiple ways to do it, all of which seem stupid.) Point being: I don't think a knob or a wheel is required or optimal to solve the problem you describe.

Multiple pushes to shift into neutral? Are there any other ones that have multiple pushes? Just wondering, I think I’ve used multiple push for neutral once ever (for an automatic car wash).

> But it means that either the shift lever has to be stateless, or the shift lever has to be movable by the system

Wouldn't it work to have the shift lever be stateful but overridable by the system?

When you turn off the car have the system put it in "Park" regardless of the position of the shift lever. Do not allow the car to be started unless the shift lever is first moved to "Park".

If you turned off the car with the shift lever in some other position you will have to move it to "Park" to enable starting.

Similar for opening the driver's door when the car is not in "Park". Require moving the shift lever to "Park" then to some other setting in order to disengage the auto-Park and resume driving.

I think most people would have no trouble dealing with this because most automatic transmission cars in the US already restrict starting to certain settings, typically "Park" and "Neutral".

Gift link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43362565

The ability to reduce ANY control system to a logical schematic, does nothing to make it intuitive and ergonomicaly correct. The other component is that there is NOTHING logical about driving itself, it's all physical skill, useing hand/foot eye coordination and memory for route planning, while maintainig situational awareness. so there is nothing left to remember the latest logic fuckery, maskerading as a "feature" The neverending re-design of domestic aplliences has emboldened corporations into thinking that they can dig deaper into peoples lives, and somehow capture attention, and therefor greater market share. Wierdly enough, it is the cheapest appliences that are easiest on the head, large white box with two doors, the one on top freezes things, while the larger one below, just gets cold, its got a knobby thing in there, which if you leave it pointing strait up, like it comes from the factory, will work fine. Vs the giant shiny thing that quickly starts yelling at me because I have the temerity to get moe than ONE thing out in a timely fashion and my truck that ,woooooo!!!, are you sure you want to unlock,ALL the doors, woooooo!!, I dont know, it's not safe out there so we out the alarm button next to the unlock button that you have to keep pressing, in order to open, the other doors, and lo, hark ye!, the niehbors are also ,continiously, enjoying all the wonders of modern design.

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