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Placing Neutral between Drive and Reverse was safer Some modern push-button automatics, like the Lincoln Navigator pictured here, have done away with the selection lever - but if anything, it’s even harder to accidentally mis-select a mode.

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Should he not lift it enough, the car will remain in forward low while the driver is looking backwards and expecting the car to move in that direction.” The driver has to lift the lever to go into reverse.

“The driver is forced to look at the shift lever for confirmation of the gear in use. “It takes no science and little foresight to accurately condemn a particularly dangerous transmission shift pattern - the P N D L R quadrant common to Cadillacs, Buicks, Oldsmobiles, Pontiacs, Studebakers and Ramblers over the past ten years,” he wrote. In the second chapter of his seminal book Unsafe at Any Speed, Nader raised five ripped-from-the-headlines examples of death, injury and destruction caused by the poor design of this P-N-D-L-R shift arrangement. It took none other than noted safety advocate Ralph Nader to help bring the problems with this arrangement to light. Ralph Nader noted that the old P-N-D-L-R arrangement was unsafe Given the mass of, say, a ’59 Eldorado, traveling suddenly in the wrong direction could result in very unpleasant consequences for any persons, animals or objects that happened to be in the way. The problem that arose, however, was one of user error: people attempting to shift into a low forward gear would wind up overshooting into Reverse without realizing it, or vice versa. In one sense, it made sense after all, you want Reverse to be easy to find, so why not put it at the very end of the shifter? One common layout, found in General Motors and Chrysler models, among others, placed Reverse at the far end of the shifter, past Neutral, Drive and the lower gears.

When the automatic transmission was young, carmakers would often set up their own shifters however they damn well felt like it. Older shifters used a P-N-D-L-R arraingement Well, there’s actually a very good reason: the United States government says so. But in all those times, have you ever stopped to wonder: Gee, why is it that every car’s shifter seems to go from Reverse to Neutral to Drive? You’ve probably shifted from Park to Drive a hundred thousand times, and from Drive to Reverse nearly as many.

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In case you’ve never driven (or, somehow, only driven cars with manual transmissions, in which place, god bless you), those four letters stand for Park, Reverse, Neutral and Drive - or, in layman’s terms, Stopped, Backwards, Free-Rolling and Forwards. If your car has an automatic transmission, the different positions you can shift into follow a specific pattern: P-R-N-D, usually followed by either a couple of lower gear options or the chance to shift it into a manual control mode. This week: something about your car’s automatic transmission you may have never noticed.

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Welcome to Further Details, a series dedicated to ubiquitous but overlooked elements hidden on your favorite products.

Stick shift knobs cool