>When driving manual you already unconciously know the gear you’re in.You've never been fender bumped by a driver who forgot he was in first gear/reverse, thought he was in neutral, and just let go of the clutch without the brakes on? Happened to me twice.
I often find myself checking I'm in neutral before letting go of the clutch during complex parking maneuvers, because I can't trust my memory on where I last left the gear stick.
On my old 2003 Fiat Panda, the gear shifter was placed quite high up[1], closer to the side of the steering wheel rather than down in the console, so you could tell with your peripheral vision whether it's still in gear, and also easily flick it into neutral with just your pinkie finger without taking your hands of the wheel. I miss mechanical UX like that when a lot of though was put in stuff like this, instead of every car being a copy-paste of the same barren generic platform, void of mechanical interactions, and with just an iPad in the center, designed to be as cheap to manufacture as possible.
[1] https://assets.adac.de/image/upload/ar_16:9,c_fill,f_auto,g_...
You've never been fender bumped by a driver who forgot he was in first gear/reverse, thought he was in neutral, and just let go of the clutch without the brakes on? Happened to me twice.
I often find myself checking I'm in neutral before letting go of the clutch during complex parking maneuvers, because I can't trust my memory on where I last left the gear stick.
On my old 2003 Fiat Panda, the gear shifter was placed quite high up[1], closer to the side of the steering wheel rather than down in the console, so you could tell with your peripheral vision whether it's still in gear, and also easily flick it into neutral with just your pinkie finger without taking your hands of the wheel. I miss mechanical UX like that when a lot of though was put in stuff like this, instead of every car being a copy-paste of the same barren generic platform, void of mechanical interactions, and with just an iPad in the center, designed to be as cheap to manufacture as possible.
[1] https://assets.adac.de/image/upload/ar_16:9,c_fill,f_auto,g_...