It’s fascinating to look at cars built before convention settled in on the automotive industry, and the further back one looks, the more interesting it becomes.
Shift patterns on manual transmissions — in passenger cars and light-duty trucks — have been standardized for decades so that anyone who can drive a 75-year-old vehicle with a floor-shifter can quickly figure out its modern descendant. Throw a column-shifter in there, and with some minor mental gymnastics, the transition isn’t much harder. It all works, because the established pattern is some form of an H, and the progression through that H doesn’t vary.
