Source ROAD & TRACK
Hurst Pistol Grip
Hurst is famous for its gear levers, becoming one of the most iconic names in American muscle. Pistol-grip handles, with indents for your fingers, make for a joy to hold, and look seriously cool.
Volkswagen Golf GTI Golfball
The GTI has a ton of neat interior features, but perhaps the coolest is its gear lever knob. The golf ball texture is a nifty detail to see and feel, and it's a throwback to the original GTI. Clever.
Fiat Abarth 695 Biposto
The Fiat Abarth 695 Biposto uses race-spec dog rings in its gearbox for lightning-fast upshifts without having to use the clutch pedal. The sequential-style gear lever itself is a work of art, but don't be fooled—it's still formatted with an H-pattern.
Chevrolet Camaro Horseshoe Ratchet
We love our muscle cars with H-pattern manual gearboxes, but the Horseshoe Ratchet GM fit to automatic-transmission Camaros and other cars is so cool. It suits this sort of car so well.
Pagani Huayra
Everything Horacio Pagani does is a work of art, and the gear lever for the single-clutch gearbox in the Huayra is no exception. It uses all sorts of springs and linkages to create a perfect feel, should you decide to use it instead of the paddle shifters. It's also gorgeous to look at.
Cord Preselector
See that tiny chromed piece to the right of the steering column? That's the gear lever on this 1930s Cord. It's a preselector gearbox: The driver chooses the next gear ahead of time, then the car shifts automatically when the clutch is depressed. It was too complex a system to ever become mainstream, beyond a handful of 1930s luxury cars. But today, it's a fascinating look at how we got to the modern automatic transmission.
Citroën SM
Everything about the Citroën SM was strange and wonderful, so it's no surprise its five-speed gear lever is unlike anything else. The whole centre piece moves with the shifter, and it makes the most satisfying metallic clunk when you engage a new gear.
Spyker Open-Linkage Manual
The manual gear lever on Spyker's crazy Dutch supercars is so simple, yet so elegant. You wouldn't be crazy to buy a Spyker just for the shifter.
2002-2005 Honda Civic Si
The dash-mounted gear lever on the 2002-2005 Honda Civic Si looks strange, but it's actually ingenious. It puts the lever nice and close to the steering wheel, while maintaining a nice, short throw, and freeing up space between the seats.
1983 Oldsmobile Hurst Lightning Rods
Designed for drag racing, the amazing Hurst Lightning Rod gear lever lets drivers go through gears on their automatic transmissions one shift knob at a time. The one on the left is a normal PRND lever, while the one on the far right shifts from first to second, and the one in the middle handles second to third. With a different stick for each gear change, you minimize the risk of grabbing the wrong gear in the heat of a drag race.
Mercedes-Benz CLK-GTR
Yes, that little steel nub is a shift knob. This little gear lever , found on the homologation special Mercedes-Benz CLK-GTR, is used to select drive and reverse, while the paddles on the steering wheel control up- and downshifts while driving.
Citroën 2CV
The Citroën 2CV might have been an affordable people's car, but it featured all sorts of innovative, interesting engineering. Its gear lever is particularly cool: The rod moves side to side and in and out of the dash, rather than up and down. This seems totally weird, but 2CV owners love it.
Audi R8 Gated Manual
The first-generation Audi R8 wasn't the first car to use a gated manual transmission, but it did perfect the design. Yes, it's beautiful to look at, but it also was intensively engineered to feel better than any gated shifter before it.