I’ve been driving Mercedes automatics for years and, until recently, never really thought about the gear selector logic at all. You get in, foot on brake, flick the little stalk, off you go. Your hand does it automatically now. Which is probably just as well, because if you stop and think about it for too long, the whole thing starts to unravel slightly.
To go forwards, you pull the selector down.
To go backwards, you push it up.
And the other day it suddenly occurred to me this makes absolutely no intuitive sense whatsoever.
In a manual car, the gear you engage to move off forwards generally involves an upward (or forward) movement somewhere in the process. Reverse, meanwhile, is usually shoved somewhere awkward and unnatural, often involving pushing down (or rearward), lifting a collar, or fumbling about like you’re trying to open an old wall safe.
Then I started thinking about old-school automatics with the selector in the middle. In those, you physically move down through Reverse on the way to Drive. So when you’re already in Drive and want Reverse, you move the selector upwards. Which at least vaguely fits with decades of ingrained instinct.
But Mercedes decided that wasn’t quite complicated enough.
Now, to be fair, I understand the deliberate push-pull action itself. You don’t want people accidentally selecting reverse while reaching for a boiled sweet. Fine. Completely sensible. But why invert the direction as well? Somewhere along the line somebody decided that down should mean forwards and up should mean backwards, and everyone else apparently just accepted this without further discussion.
The strange thing is how quickly people adapt. I’ve driven these cars for years without consciously questioning it. The brain simply rewires itself and gets on with the job, rather like accepting that modern televisions now need software updates before they’ll show you the weather.
But I do slightly worry that if I ever get into a car where the logic is reversed again, I’m going to instinctively select the wrong gear while trying to reverse out of a parking space and instead lurch bonnet-first through the window of Hobbs House Bakery in Chipping Sodbury.
For those unfamiliar with Chipping Sodbury, the parking there sits at ninety degrees to the pavement because the High Street dates from the days when sheep and cattle markets were held there. It’s absurdly wide by modern standards because several hundred years ago people needed room to move livestock around while arguing about the price of a pig.
So there I’ll be, confidently believing I’ve selected reverse, gently lifting off the brake, then suddenly accelerating straight towards a display of artisanal sourdough while everybody outside the coffee shop pauses mid-conversation to watch an elderly Mercedes dismantle a bakery in real time.
And this is increasingly the problem with modern engineering. It takes systems people already understood perfectly well, redesigns them for reasons that probably made sense in a PowerPoint presentation somewhere, then leaves the rest of us operating expensive machinery largely through muscle memory and optimism.
The first fully automatic gearbox, introduced by Oldsmobile back in 1939, managed perfectly adequately without turning the controls into a behavioural science experiment. Fluid couplings, planetary gears, entirely mechanical. No software. No menus. No “driver interface philosophy”. Yet ordinary people somehow coped without demolishing local businesses.
Modern cars, meanwhile, increasingly feel as though they’re designed by people who regard actual drivers as an unfortunate design complication. Every function is hidden behind touchscreens, submenus, haptic buttons, or steering wheel controls so sensitive you accidentally reset the trip computer while sneezing.
And Mercedes are particularly susceptible to this sort of thing because German engineering occasionally disappears into its own intellectual fog. Most of the time this produces magnificent engines and doors that shut with the sound of a bank vault. Every now and then, however, it produces a gear selector system that quietly overwrites forty years of learned instinct in the background like a firmware update.
The worrying thing is I now barely notice it.
Which probably means the system has won.
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