in modern cars instead of a simple STRAIGHT PRNDL1L2?? On my particular c ar I am always shifting into Neutral instead of into Drive - something I di dn't have to look at when I owned a car with a straight shift.
nlock. I worked on it, it won't ever lock again!, I Garantee. Back in the 1
970s I owned a 1970 VW van. I was down town getting a haircut, got back in the VW van, the durn steering wheel would't unlock. I could still steer onl y a little bit, but I managed to get back home to my driveway. Needless to say, I worked on that steering wheel lock too, I never did have any more pr oblems with it.
did the same thing on my '01 dodge van. Also disabled the shift lock which left me stuck 200 miles from my house
Hah, that reminds me of when I was a little kid... my dad's old Cutlass went to the Big Parking Lot In The Sky because of terminal frame rust (if I knew then what I knew today I would have begged him to stash it in my grandpa's barn until I turned 16 and learned how to weld, because it was a '67 which was the penultimate iteration of the classic small RWD American hardtop... IMHO better looking than the 68-72 although the latter was probably more technically advanced... then it was all over after that, but I digress) and bought a used Ford Pinto because my mom was racking up a lot of miles teaching at a school close to 30 miles away from the house and he figured something smaller and lighter would save money on fuel.
Well, my mom was and is still a good driver, she's one of a handful of people that I feel comfortable riding with as a passenger, although she's always had an annoying habit of strictly obeying the speed limit at all times (in the right lane of the freeway, fortunately.) But what this thread reminded me of was that my dad brought the Pinto home and parked it in the garage nose-in, and then left to go somewhere driving his old pickup truck, leaving my mom with the Pinto. She wanted to go somewhere as well, but could not find reverse, so we couldn't leave!
It turns out that while both my parents had driven stickshifts most of their lives save for a few vehicles, apparently all of the cars my mom had had were old school three speeds, and the Pinto was a four speed... not really a huge problem in and of itself, as the shift pattern was engraved right there on the knob. However, if you remember, the old three speeds never had a reverse lockout, but the Pinto *did* - you had to push down on the knob to get the lever into the reverse gate. Keep in mind that I was a little kid at the time and while I *had* actually driven a manual transmission vehicle, a Farmall tractor doesn't have these kinds of safety features, so I wasn't any help! (hope she's not reading this...)
I understood the rational for the shift pattern but the 914 was a street car and like paddle shifters on steering wheels, the funky pattern was a gimmick. At least paddle shifters are intuitive. Weird shifter patterns are not.
As far as I know, this is not a moderated newsgroup but OK, I'll follow the rules as laid down by your original post.
The reason you don't look down when using these shifters is that you're going to naturally try to follow the track. This just causes balky shifting. Grip the shifter lightly and let the spring loading do it's job. You guys that are getting frustrated should just try to relax your grip a little.
My 1978 and my 1983 Dodge vans it is P R N D 2 1. My manual shift 1948 Willys Jeep, I would have to go outside and look. Jeep has two gear shift levers.
That problem can be worked around. I drove my Renault 11 for quite some time with only 1st and 2nd available, due to a partially broken shift linkage. With some care, such as only parking nose in uphill, I did not have to get out and push it backwards too often.
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