Shifters & Accessories
Driving a modern vehicle is so much easier than driving the first vehicles made, and this is because of the number of tools the manufacturer gives you to work with. Your vehicle is designed to be comfortable to drive and to give you easy access to everything you need, and the responsibility you have is to make sure all these tools are working at their best. This means replacing them when they break down, and sometimes before it happens.
Each gear shifter is designed specifically for the vehicle you are driving, because some have very different features to others. For instance, some automatic transmission shifters will have buttons on them to lock the shifter in position, or to tell the computer when to change gear. Manual gear shifters need to be different lengths to reach a gear box in a different location on each vehicle, and some are even in different positions inside the vehicle. However, there are some similarities including that each is made of very strong materials to last for a long time, and each one is designed to move within very specific-sized slots in the transmission.
As we said before, you can easily forget about your gear shifter despite using it nearly constantly, but if there are problems with it, you will know immediately. The most serious problem is with the metal rod connecting the gear shifter to the transmission, and if it becomes weakened and snaps, you will not be able to drive anywhere. On the less-serious end of the scale, gear shifters can begin to warp so they are not quite reaching the areas they need to reach, or they are not of the perfect shape to enter certain slots in the gearbox.
As these problems occur, there are a large number of symptoms to inform you so you can take action as required. One of the symptoms is that it can be very difficult to change gear, and you may even find it is impossible, because the gear shifter rod is warped or broken. You can also discover that the vehicle drops into neutral while you are driving along, and this is a symptom that the problem is where the gear shifter actually connects to the gearbox. Each problem can be rectified quite quickly, but only if you discover them quickly enough.
The gear shifter in your vehicle is something you do not think about, but you use it every time you drive. Of course, in the case of a manual transmission, you may be using it hundreds of times in a single trip, so you can only imagine where you would be if it stopped working. Different transmissions will work in different ways, and automatic transmissions are often more simple because moving the gear shifter will simply slide one notch into another.