Car Designers Just Can’t Resist Messing with Automatic Transmissions

Back when cars only had three manual speeds and reverse, the possibility of mixing up the gears was minimal. At least you had a one in four chance of getting it right. But after the popularization of the automatic transmission in the 1950s, the controls for gear selection became a question of both design and ergonomics.

In 1971, the Department of Transportation mandated automatics use the PRNDL—say “prindle”—layout. The impetus of this law, like so many automotive regulations, stemmed from the 1965 book Unsafe at Any Speed, in which Ralph Nader called out General Motors, Studebaker, and Rambler for using confusing transmission designs that put Reverse after Drive. Nader cited crashes resulting from drivers missing the intended gear and accelerating in the wrong direction. The PNDLR pattern was dangerous, he asserted. Plus, it’s not nearly as fun to say.

It remains a debate today. In 2016, Star Trek actor Anton Yelchin died when he was crushed by his Jeep after failing to properly secure the vehicle in Park due to a confusing shifter design. The accident led to a recall of more than a million vehicles and installation of software that put them in Park when the driver’s door was opened. Eventually, then parent Fiat Chrysler Automobiles redesigned affected models to incorporate shifters with a traditional PRNDL feel.

Despite the seemingly obvious driver benefit of keeping shift patterns consistent across cars and brands, designers just can’t stop playing with their alphabet soup. These days, the mechanical connections that once limited how wacky a company could get with its shifter are gone, and shift-by-wire gear selectors give automakers additional interior-design flexibility since there’s no physical link between the shifter and the transmission. But freedom means PRNDL is sometimes scattered like a dropped rack of Scrabble tiles. The result is some strange configurations, like these: