If you’re old enough to remember, there was a time when column shifters were a thing. From the personal luxury coupe to your family’s station wagon all the way up to your grandparents’ luxo barge, they were almost an industry standard. Due to changing consumer tastes they fell out of favor, but now, column shifters are making a return thanks to the most unexpected of segments: electric cars.
Column shifters were typically reserved for passenger cars and station wagons, but that started to change in the 1990s. A wave of new minivans and SUVs came equipped with them and lasted well into the 2000s; vehicles like the first-generation Ford Expedition and Lincoln Navigator, and nearly all of GMs minivan attempts had column shifters.
But around the same time as the rise of the SUV, column shifters slowly started to fall out of favor in passenger cars. There were a few reasons, mainly to do with consumer preferences. More buyers started to want more space to put their crap, leading to larger and roomier center consoles. Sometimes it was a usability thing – some column shifters were clunky to use or would block certain controls. For years now, the vast majority of new cars have had gear shifters in the center console, with pickup trucks being the last group of vehicles available with column shifters.
American makes were some of the last holdouts. Cars like the Cadillac DeVille and Buick Park Avenue and LeSabre had them well into the mid 2000s. The Cadillac lost its column shifter when the DeVille became the DTS in 2005 and both the Park Avenue and LeSabre were gone by then, too. (You could buy new base and mid-level Buick Lucernes with a bench seat and column shifter as late as 2011.) BMW tried to make column shifters a thing with the E65 7 Series, but went back to the console-mounted shifter when the E65 was replaced by the F01 in 2008.
With this new generation of electric cars, column shifters are making a comeback in passenger cars. EVs like Hyundai’s Ioniq models, most Teslas, every Mercedes EQ product, the Kia EV9, the Chevy Blazer EV and even the Fisker Ocean all have column shifters. They don’t look like the shifters you may be used to, either. Most appear to be just another steering wheel stalk; something you’d twist or pull to turn on the wipers or cruise control. Aside from being unique in the modern era, moving the shifter to the column always creates more space in the center console, especially in EVs where there aren’t any pesky transmission tunnels to deal with.
But there are more gas cars becoming equipped with column shifters, too. Mercedes has been using column shifters in nearly all of its sedans and crossovers for a few years now, and the latest Porsche Cayenne and Panamera moved the gear shifter next to the steering column. Hyundai’s new Kona and Santa Fe use the same column shifter as its EVs, too.
Here’s to hoping EVs continue inspiring engineers and designers to draw from the past to create daring and cool user-friendly features that’ll actually make driving better.
