Fiat Chrysler executives are not at all happy about the fact that 1.1-million cars and trucks are being recalled globally because of a shifter design that is being blamed for 41 injuries and lots of other incidents when drivers got out of their vehicles with them still in gear when they thought that the cars were in park. Sounds dumb, right? I can tell you point of fact that it actually happened to me during a long road trip in a Jeep Grand Cherokee two winters ago.
The company makes it seem like the drivers are just too dumb to operate their car and that a salesmen could teach people how to use it in five seconds, solving the problem. If it were only that easy. “Learning” the shifter does take about five seconds, it is overcoming the fact that it works differently and any other shifter you’ve likely ever used before is what the problem is. You knock it forward and think that the vehicle is in part and it isn’t.
Here’s a paragraph form my review of the 2015 talking directly to this situation. The thing is just not good.
I’ll gripe about the shifter for a minute. The t-handled unit is a switch that you kind of knock up and down to make the Jeep do what you want. It isn’t doing anything but activating electronic stuff and it can be finicky at times. More than once I pushed it up to go into park and I went to get out of the Jeep only to find it either in neutral or still in gear. If it happened once it would have been an anomaly but since it happened 4-5 times over the course of our trip, I’m calling it a flaw. My opinion, take it for what you will.
I don’t think I am an idiot, I have driven a couple of hundred cars over the last few years, and the only one that has given me any issue in this regard is the Jeep. It is not a flawed design, it is a bad design. FCA can talk all they want about how this problem does not exist in Europe where the people are more “used to” shifters like this but the reality is that the market that dominates the sales for the vehicles these shifters are in is not “used to” them and history has proven that sometimes designers and engineers can create things just far enough outside of the public’s conscious that they cause problems. This seems like one of those times.
Well I recently completed repairs on a Dodge Challenger where the owner was adamant he had placed it into park only to step from the vehicle and have it pace away, colliding into another vehicle, resulting in an average amount of damage. I assumed he had a brain fade at the time. After reading this I retract that assumption.
Why change something that’s worked near flawlessly for decades?
And then proceed to construct it from horrible shitty plastic.
Because Technology Gadgets
Because Marketing Department
Because Focus Groups
I wonder if they’ll switch to that emasculating “dial-a-gear” selector that they use on the Ram pickups. Yuck! I’d take an actual mechanical shifter over the e-shift crap every time.
All the things humanity knows about building cars that work goes straight out the window every time a new crop of college-educated engineers comes in to replace the old guys going out. New stuff gets built like that shifter that is just stupid. Stuff that isn’t stupid will fail in 5-10 years and make the car nearly worthless due to repair costs. Stuff that isn’t stupid and won’t fail gets pilloried by smart-ass automotive “journalists” (not you) as not cool enough so sales are affected and the effort becomes a bad investment. Ahh, life. So, we’re still driving a ’91 Cherokee anyhow.
I drove a Chrysler 300, as rental car, once and…to say I was turned off by this transmission, is being polite. It’s more garbage, then usable transmission.
Ah… the shifter has an issue, the transmission is the same ZF transmission found in Audi and BMW vehicles. It has NO issues.
The shifter is an Audi design.
http://services.edmunds-media.com/image-service/unversioned-ed/ximm/?quality=85&image=/img/long-term/2012-audi-a8/audi_a8_shifter-thumb-717×477-112864.jpg
You expected better from Fiat? I see their point, after all if you thought that Italian design referred to engineering; that would have been your first mistake.
This shifter is not an FCA design, it is Audi. The current shifters that came after this are all FCA designs.
i own a 2014 JGC with this exact shifter… i admit initially it took some getting used to, but after driving the vehicle for a few weeks i had no problems… and no issues since… its like anything else, you get used to it after a while… just pay attention to what your doing… there are LEDs next to the shifter and lights on the dash that tell you what gear your in… it ain’t rocket science.
Excellent article Brian with great comments following. As a 54 year old car guy I don’t see how something as important as a shifter has been moved from a mechanical device to an electronic one. That one sentence needs no further explanation, and for the OEM to suggest it’s the driver that makes a mistake they should pay dearly for that alone on top of any physical damage. Why have they made cars so electronically dependent?
Because the general driving public are getting lazier I feel. Electronic parking brakes for instance. Apparently its too hard to pull up on a lever now, so we will replace it with a stupid button that falls off after a few years, or the multi control wheels that are intended to do everything, but only manage in distracting and frustrating the driver, right up until it falls off too.
Couldn’t happen to a nicer company (Fiat).
The electronic shifter is an answer in search of a problem and the pinheads who wrecked the Jeep marque are now facing the music. Good riddance.
Agreed, Jay. I’ve owned a couple CJ7’s and currently own a TJ. Other than their J10 concept, I’ve seen nothing from FCA to make me want to buy a Jeep from them.
These shifters are similar to the BMW iDrive (or whatever they call that infernal thing). We had one as a rental once, and we joke that it took my boss 3 days to work out how to get the thing into park!
I have owned many cars that had shifters or parking brakes that were “not normal”. You learned it in 5 seconds and then you were in the CLUB. Merkur XR4Ti was one. Reverse was not where you would expect. Triumphs had a push down for reverse type lever. TR3s had a Fly-off parking brake handle. The world is now full of people who want cars that drive themselves. I can’t think of anything more dangerous than that. Learn to drive your car or take it back to the dealer, go home and wait.
Sounds like the shifter equivalent of the traffic circle, a cultural changing solution to a non-existent problem.
Very unmanly for a Jeep vehicle.
Roll some heads.
The vehicle design assured me it was in PARK.
It’s parked now, in my neighbor’s flower garden pushed up against the house.