Hacker News Reader

Comment by quadrifoliate | Hacker News Reader

> Depress the clutch as you would in any car, and pull the knob from its secure location out of first gear. Now you will become adrift in the zone known to early Porsche owners as “Neverland” and your quest will be to find second gear. Prepare yourself for a ten-second-or-so adventure. Do not go straight forward with the shift knob, as you will only find Reverse waiting there to mock you with a shriek of high-speed gear teeth machining themselves into round cylinders.

I was confused by this until I searched for "Porsche 914 shift pattern" on Google Images. I guess it's a dog-leg gearbox (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog-leg_gearbox).

View on HN

The Deuce and a Half has an even more interesting one, just when you think you've figured out the dog-leg you find the last two are reversed again.

HN supports shift pattern unicode!

Ⓡ②⑤

|–|–|

①③④

If that sounds crazy, it is. The M35 2 1/2 ton truck shift pattern: https://live.staticflickr.com/4130/5082855966_efbf3c3f00_c.j...

Also, odd, but the Citroen M35 has a similar name and shift pattern, even though it's a car and completely unrelated.

https://ranwhenparkeddotnet.files.wordpress.com/2010/11/m352...

Patterns like those are really, really really common on truck transmissions.

One rail is 1st/reverse. Another rail is 2nd/3rd and the last rail is 4th or OD and direct. Whether the "fore is a lower gear than aft" holds between the 2nd and 3rd rails is a function of whether or not it's a the pair of gears that constitute "forward gear on the right rail) will either be greater or less than 1:1 depending on if it's an overdrive transmission whereas the rear position on the right rail will always be direct for reasons that boil down to "that's the sensible way to build it".

There's not much to "figure out" when you have a direct lever that goes into the shifter.

Exactly, the more the device can assume the operator is trained the simpler it is - so truck transmissions are closer to the "Platonic Transmission Form" if you will than fancy car transmissions.

The Deuce doesn't even have synchronizers, you're expected to double clutch and handle that part yourself.

They make automatic semi trucks these days, so depending on your POV, that's either closer or futher from the platonic ideal for transmission layout.

You’re not kidding! I first learned to drive stick in a deuce-and-a-half that my dad bought cheap at a surplus auction.

I accidentally shifted from 1st straight into 5th quite a few times. The darn thing had so much torque that it wouldn’t even stall when you did that!

Much better than shifting from 5th straight into 1st though :)

Fun fact: the torque converter was invented a few years before the automatic transmission - and some cars were sold with a manual transmission and a torque converter. With only two or three forward gears, they found most of the customers would leave the car in the top gear and just accelerate slowly ...

The Buick Dynaflow was almost entirely reliant on a multiple-element torque converter, in front of a 2-speed manual similar to the Powerglide. Slow and inefficient, but very smooth.

Reminds me of the Terminator when he commanders the tanker truck and pulls up the schematics by scanning the shift lever.

They should have had a throwaway scene where he tries to steal a Deuce from an armory and it comes up, "File Not Found."

Or he's throwing errors and has to reboot himself trying to find 4th.

> and then rapidly wig-wag the shift knob side-to-side along a lateral axis.

I learned this driving my first car which was a similar vintage Karmann Ghia. It still did it out of habit twenty years later driving my stick-shift Jetta. The second YouTube video I found of someone learning to drive a KG was doing it instinctively as well. [1] I guess there's so much play you just learn to wig-wag a little to see if you're in gear or not.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WF77y8IVi8k

I wonder if the linkage could be replaced by a cable?

My 77 Firebird has aftermarket shift and throttle cables.

Of course, my Firebird is an automatic, so who knows. Maybe a two cable system would do?

It’s a better pattern for racing since you can more easily shift between 2nd and 3rd gear in a quicker way. Older Ferraris (I believe the Testarossa and the TR512, but maybe others too) also have the same pattern.

The Ferrari V6/V8 cars from the 206 Dino through the 328 have that pattern, but they switched to a standard shift pattern in the 348. You can't accidentally shift into reverse though, as the metal shift gate has a stop on it. You have to push down to get past the stop and into reverse.

> since you can more easily shift between 2nd and 3rd gear in a quicker way

That is in part a secondary effect of how wide and crisp the offsets are between gears (how 'deep' the H shape is). On the gear boxes people tend to like, going from 2nd to 3rd, and 3rd to 4th take very close to the same time. On my little roadster I'd just stomp on the clutch and throw the gear knob in the general vicinity of where it needed to be, relying on hand-eye coordination and the synchros to do the real work (I missed maybe 3 shifts a year, and half of those when I was tired).

Compare this to the car I learned stick on - the infamous Chevy Citation, made during the nadir of Detroit - where the gearbox was roughly shaped like an X, although at the time it felt like an l. I lost track of how many times I accidentally upshifted instead of downshifted at a stop sign, and that engine had less torque than an electric pencil sharpener, so the engine would simple stall the moment I tried to let the clutch out.

The roadster I subsequently drove, I experimented and found that if I was even a little careful I could get moving from a dead stop in 3rd gear. Basically a modified tractor engine. All torque, no horsepower.

What a blast from the past. I learnt to drive using a VW Golf, and I've always thought this shift pattern is just standard on German cars with manual transmission (at least in the 90s).

One thing I don't see mentioned is that you first have to press down onto the knob, then shift forward, in order to shift the transmission into R. Simply pushing the knob forward won't go from N to R.

Not just press down on shift knob, but a bit to the side too.

On my old Jetta (left hand drive), it was more like "Up and to the Left a little bit", and not a straight throw from first.

My first car was a 78 Rabbit that had the push-down for R. I also had a Renault Megane that had a pull-up-collar to find R.

First time I rented a German car I yelled out in the parking garage for help! Some kind strangers explained this to me about the reverse and I got on my way.

From a video I saw recently I think some of the old lancias (group b stuff) were similar, the pattern was not shown but the driver referred to being careful with first so as not to launch the car in reverse.

So I’m guessing this was one of the standard gear patterns in the late 70s / early 80s euros, back when car affordances were often nebulous concepts.

Reverse lockouts came around in the 80s or so, so his 914 wouldn't have one. On older transmissions you're free to try to ram it into reverse at 100 kph if you really want to try.

My Ford Contour SVT (Mondeo in the UK I think?) had a collar under the shift knob that you had to pull upwards to shift into reverse. Had never seen that before, and I felt awfully embarrassed to ask the guy selling me the car how it worked.

I had a '92 Nissan Sentra as my first car in the early 2000's, a hand-me-down from my older brother - it also had this dog-leg shift pattern. Looks like it wasn't just German cars that had this transmission.

Definitely burned out a clutch early from learning to drive and learning to drive stick at the same time, but damn do I miss it sometimes.

> this shift pattern is just standard on German cars with manual transmission

"Standard?" Hmm. We have two cars with manual transmission, a VW Sharan and a VW Up:

The Sharan has R at the top left, then (reading across) 1 3 5 with 2 4 6 below; so 6th is at the bottom right.

The Up only has 5 forward gears, but for some reason they decided to put R at the bottom right (so down from 5th... you can probably see where this story is going)

I have once, and only once, been driving along at motorway speed in the Up, in 5th, and briefly thought I was in the Sharan, and started trying to change up to 6th, except the Up only has 5, and you're heading for R, not 6th. Happily I didn't complete the change...

but for some reason they decided to put R at the bottom right

Reverse in the bottom right is the “normal” 5-speed reverse spot no?

> Reverse in the bottom right is the “normal” 5-speed reverse spot no?

I've driven a lot of 5-speed manual transmission rental cars over the decades, and my impression is that reverse in the top left is (or certainly was) the far more common layout:

  R 1 3 5
    2 4

Our previous car, also a VW, had this layout too.

I'd have to agree with GP here. It was my impression that reverse in the bottom right is the 'classic' spot for a 5-gear manual transmission, unless a reverse lockout is used (then it is usually the top left spot).

I have a 2007 Alfa Spider (Brera without a solid roof) and the pattern is the same with a 6th gear below 5.

To get into reverse there's a gear stick collar to pull up.

That part of the story reminded me of the 1978 MGB I had as a teenager. If you had just a little leftward pressure on the stick going from 1st to 2nd the gearbox would happily announce "welcome to reverse!". The throw between gears was so small I ended up just using my middle finger to push down from 1st to 2nd and 3rd to 4th and then hooking my thumb around the knob to go from 2nd to 3rd. 5th gear was electric - a little switch that seemed to break every few months.

The name "Neverland" is new to me, but I remember that place of limbo well. Assuming the tranny is in good order, there's a firm spring detent that generally saves the driver from 1->R upshift failures.

The 1->4 mistake OTOH, having drifted a little too far right in Neverland, was easily fallen into, and the shuddering deceleration that follows may have been the cause of a few rear-end collisions over the years.

Not sure if this is specific to Porsches, I think several factors are at play here: (1) old cars (even Porsches) were not so precision-engineered as they are today. Today you can operate the gear shift using only two fingers, not so in the seventies; (2) of course, a car being ~50 years old doesn't help either...

I had a 3 speed + R transmission in a 1970 Ford. It was originally a column shift but the original owner converted it to a standard floor shift. I don't know if that was the reason for the weird shift pattern it had (nor do I know the original shift pattern), but by the time I got it, it was:

1 2

R 3

Reply on news.ycombinator.com