maze-style shifters

[makken]

My normal car is a manual, and I believe all of the automatics I've driven has been the push a button and pull straight back type. The only one that has any side movement is my parent's BMW for the manual-matic mode.

Anyways a while back my aunt picked up a new lexus that has one of those maze-style automatic shifters. I've driven it a few times the last few days, and for the life of me I cannot understand the point of designing a shifter this way.

There's been a few times where I had to quickly do a 3 point turnabout and its taken longer than normal because moving from D to R and vice versa is so awkward. I'm also constantly afraid of accidentally bumping it to R while driving as there's no button to press.

Is there an actual advantage to using this type of layout because I'm struggling to see how this is better in any way than the standard push-button-pull-straight-back type.

 

[thedarkwolf]

Well on my mom's old mercedes D and N where in the same plane or whatever you want to call it so you couldn't accidentally put the car in R or L without moving it over to the side and up or down. Never really bothered me. Actually my column shifted van basically does the same thing. You have to pull the shifter back towards you to move from the D and N section into the R P 2 and 1 sections.

 

[LTC8K6]

Your Lexus is smart enough not to go into R at speed, even if you make the mistake.

My Jeep GC has that Mercedes style auto shifter. Hated it at first. Now I love it.

As the wolf said, the column shifters were basically the same way.

 

[JDub02]

the "maze" took the place of the button / shift lock. a column shifter is more like the button type. pulling the lever toward you is like pushing the button .. it unlocks the gear selector.

 

[SN4p]

My parent's have an older Audi A6 with this type of shifter, but requires a push down to move from drive to reverse and vice versa.

 

[LTC8K6]

The push down is probably in response to those unintended acceleration claims...