LEAF's Shifter Knob is backwards

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Azrich

Well-known member
Joined
Apr 22, 2010
Messages
533
Location
Tucson, AZ
I'm a sixth grade teacher and the science teacher next door had the electric company come out to do a demonstration on solar energy. This gave me the chance to talk about the LEAF with my students. I projected some of the photos from the Nissan site on my SmartBoard and was showing them the shifter knob, which is more like a switch since there are no gears.

A 12 year old girl in the front row said, "That is backwards. You click the knob back to go forward and push it up to go backward." She was right. I've seen the Japanese lady do this in the Nissan video.

Why is this backwards? Why don't we push it forward to go forward and backward to back up?
 
All cars with a center gearshift are "backwards". Park is always toward the front of the car followed by Reverse, Neutral, Drive and Low as you move toward the rear of the car. Nissan and Toyota followed suit with this direction when the designed the shifter in the Prius and the LEAF. The only difference is that they are centered and you then move to the reverse or drive position and it moves back to center on its own.
 
I've always hated that arrangement, but i think it has to do with the early H pattern manual shifters. You had the four speeds in an "H" pattern and the reverse was a push down and outside of the "H" away from you and up. It was meant to ensure you were intentionally placing it into reverse. I am thinking this is a 'holdover' from that original layout.

I may place small plastic stickers over this, lest I drive through the back wall of my garage....
 
Yes - I think Leaf should make it more intuitive. Anyway, the shifter is not like a normal gear shifter anyway. It is more like a joystick.
 
Every time I see one of these threads where people think this or that should be improved I start to worry somebody from Nissan will see it and decide to slip the schedule redesigning stuff.

From everything I've seen Leaf 1.0 is perfect just as it is. As long as they didn't put the gearshift on top of the roof I'll figure it out. I'm looking forward to getting mine in December or as soon as possible thereafter - the last thing anyone wants is another Aptera debacle.
 
LTLFTcomposite said:
Every time I see one of these threads where people think this or that should be improved I start to worry somebody from Nissan will see it and decide to slip the schedule redesigning stuff.

The chance of that is nil. At this time I'm sure any slip is so costly for Nissan - it would have to be approved by Ghosn. And that won't happen because someone at Nissan saw some suggestion on the internets :mrgreen:
 
The direction is that of the matching inertia of the vehicle. It actually is intuitive, if your hand is on it when you accel you don't want to pull it into reverse.
 
Azrich said:
But why can't the LEAF be different, more intuitive?
Because it is now "intuitive" for drivers to use the same shifting directions that they have been using for many, many years. If Nissan switched 'R'everse and 'D'rive on the Leaf, I am willing to bet that most new buyers, out of habit, would end up lurching backwards when they wanted to go forward, and vice-versa. Here is a sampling of the shift positions that drivers have been conditioned to expect:

Older Prius:
toyota_prius_shift.jpg


Newer Prius:
100212-prius-shifter-vmed-7a.nv_nws.jpg


RAV4-EV:
shifter.jpg


Tesla:
3941202388_705ed283ca.jpg


EV1:
ev1b.jpg


Honda Insight Hybrid:
6031_st0320_087.jpg


Honda Civic Hybrid:
-vert-honda-civic-hybrid-gear-shift.jpg


Nissan Versa:
-vert-nissan-versa-hatchback-gear-shift.jpg


If you can find any vehicle that flip-flops "R" and "D", please post a link to the photo!
 
This reminds of all the effort put into making computer UI "natural" a few years back. Everyone was trying to copy how something functioned in the physical world - I remember Lotus making the "organizer" just like the physical one - including horizontal lines, flipping of pages & even binder rings.

Instead, what is needed is to think of what does the user need to do - what would be a good way to tell the car what to do ? It doesn't have to be done in a great hurry and purely by feel alone - unlike gear shifting.

May be have something on the dash ? That would free up space in the console area - that can be used for larger cup holders :lol:
 
Because it is now "intuitive" for drivers to use the same shifting directions that they have been using for many, many years. If Nissan switched 'R'everse and 'D'rive on the Leaf, I am willing to bet that most new buyers, out of habit, would end up lurching backwards when they wanted to go forward, and vice-versa. Here is a sampling of the shift positions that drivers have been conditioned to expect:

Yikes! :eek: Yanquetino, I give! I give! Uncle! Uncle! Stop! This is not that important! It was just a thought.

I'm done. :oops: :oops: :oops:
 
Azrich said:
Yikes! :eek: Yanquetino, I give! I give! Uncle! Uncle! Stop! This is not that important! It was just a thought.

I'm done. :oops: :oops: :oops:

Ah, but it IS important. And from what I can tell, Nissan will implement it properly. The Prius shift pattern is an elegant thing of beauty. Just because something may SEEM counter-intuitive, does not make it so in practice.
 
darelldd said:
Azrich said:
Yikes! :eek: Yanquetino, I give! I give! Uncle! Uncle! Stop! This is not that important! It was just a thought.

I'm done. :oops: :oops: :oops:

Ah, but it IS important. And from what I can tell, Nissan will implement it properly. The Prius shift pattern is an elegant thing of beauty. Just because something may SEEM counter-intuitive, does not make it so in practice.

Besides, what are we going to do till Decemeber ? :lol:
 
evnow said:
darelldd said:
Azrich said:
Yikes! :eek: Yanquetino, I give! I give! Uncle! Uncle! Stop! This is not that important! It was just a thought.

I'm done. :oops: :oops: :oops:

Ah, but it IS important. And from what I can tell, Nissan will implement it properly. The Prius shift pattern is an elegant thing of beauty. Just because something may SEEM counter-intuitive, does not make it so in practice.

Besides, what are we going to do till Decemeber ? :lol:


That comment was posted on the Aptera forum, year after year- LOL! Dec 08, 09, etc!
 
evnow said:
May be have something on the dash ? That would free up space in the console area - that can be used for larger cup holders :lol:
And why not? I think that should be a serious suggestion. The first cars I drove (in the '50s) all had the shift on a stalk off the steering column. Then muscle cars came along with "four on the floor" because the stick went straight into the tranny. These were rear wheel drive vehicles with a hump down the middle for the drive shaft, remember? The idea was to cut out any sloppiness in the shift linkage.

Well, folks, times have changed. Now we shift by wire. Why are we still using up prime real estate with what is functionally only a switch? The Leaf shifter looks huge to me, but have you seen the one on the Volt? It's even worse -- looks like something you would use as a main cutoff for a high voltage line. (Maybe that was intentional.) Both cases strike me as designers run amuck. Engineers would never create shifters like those.
 
planet4ever said:
And why not? I think that should be a serious suggestion.

It is a serious suggestion - just not the cup holders part.

A switch on the dash - that can't be hit by accident is what we need.
 
Nissan must have opted for this approach in a fit of conservativeness. They probably are looking at the wider mass market. I agree, the dashboard buttons would be a better idea. However, they would remind me of the 1957 Rambler my parents had and the 1960's Renault my wife had at one time....see, Nissan could have lifted the buttons from their sister company!
 
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