Gear stick

It has since fallen out of favor, although it can still be found widely on North American-market pick-up trucks, vans, emergency vehicles (both law enforcement and EMS – the column shifter is retained where a floor shifter is unfeasible due to mounting the mobile data terminal and 2-way radio), and "full-size" US sedans such as the Ford Crown Victoria.

Many automatic transmission vehicles have extra controls on the gear stick, or very close by, which modify the choices made by the transmission system depending on engine and road speed, e.g. "sports" or "economy" modes which will broadly speaking allow, respectively, for higher and lower revolutions per minute, before shifting up.

Others require that the lever be lifted (e.g. Nissan), pressed down (e.g. Volkswagen), or moved with extra force (e.g. BMW) to engage reverse.

Some transmissions also have an electronically controlled error-prevention safeguard that blocks the first and sometimes the second gear from being selected if the vehicle is moving fast enough to exceed the engine's maximum RPM.

Automatic transmissions traditionally have had a straight pattern, adopting the classic P-R-N-D gate, with "P" being to the front, topmost position (or "P" all the way to the left on a column-mounted shifter); the corresponding shift positions being: All automatics use some sort of manual override of the transmission, with numbered positions in descending order marked below (or to the right) of "drive", which will prevent the transmission shifting to a gear higher than the selected, but maintaining automatic operation between all lesser numbered gears.

On some vehicles (mainly Japanese makes such as Honda, Toyota and Lexus) these numbered positions are replaced by a single "L" (for "low") position, which will hold the transmission in whatever lower ratio is required for climbing steep grades or for heavy acceleration: P-R-N-D-L. More modern automatic transmissions have employed a "J-gate" (pioneered by Jaguar) where some gears are on the left-hand "arm", some on the right, and there is a sideways movement at the rear of the pattern.

Most modern manumatics, such as Alfa Romeo's Sportronic and Porsche's Tiptronic, have a traditional automatic shift pattern on the left or right side of the gear selector, along with a connected longitudinal gate with "+" and "-" positions on the other side in which movement of the shifter forward and backward increments the gears up and down, respectively.

With the advent of drive by wire (or more properly, shift by wire) computer-controlled transmissions (particularly in the case of automatics), the gear stick no longer needs to be mechanically connected to the transmission unit itself, and can, therefore, be made much smaller since there is no need to package either remote mechanisms or complex interlocking arrangements.

OEM shift knobs are generally spherical in shape, often resembling a chess pawn when attached to the gear stick.

The gear stick, as the name implies, is often just a machined or cast aluminium or steel rod with or without threading the shift knob is fitted on its end.

[5] In recent years, manufacturers have increased the variety of shifts knobs available to the consumer from inexpensive plastics to diamond-studded white gold.