The Chrysler 200 is an absolute pile of crap

[AZhitman]

I drove a '14 Jag XJR a few months ago - Love the gear selector knob. A shift lever makes no sense on a car like that... any driver interference with the transmission on that car is simply that - interference.

[OriginalWheelman]

I wish my car came with an xbox controller I could use instead of the regular controls.

[Jesda]

2008 Jaguar SJ Vanden Plas - bit of a tortured way to shift up and down manually, I think:

I know auto journalists despised J-gate. I found it to be fine... because like Greg said above, in that kind of car you just set it and forget it. I don't think there was ever a time, in any XJ, a moment where I ever wanted to manually select the gears.

Maybe that's a different story through mountain passes out west and east, or towing a small trailer. Towing with a Jag seems so odd.

[Jesda]

You'll find this mess in Maseratis:


The stalk is a dainty little stick that breaks -very- frequently and then you use the paddles to row up and down the gears. Except for the leather that interior is much, much cheaper than it looks. It photographs nicely but then the buttons fall into the dashboard and the wood pieces (it's real thick wood) and electronic panels wobble around a quarter inch each when you touch them.

[szh]

Despite being strongly electro-nanny, I am a big fan of electronic park brakes--for exactly the same reasons you're a fan of the rotary shift knob. But plenty of other people will call me nuts for it, because it doesn't work like a normal park brake, which is important to them. Am I wrong? Are they wrong? No. We use our cars differently and thus have different expectations. In my case, I use a park brake for parking. I use the little skinny pedal for breaking the rear end lose, because I can modulate it to fine degrees separately from the front end. But the electro-brake haters don't do it that way, they want the mechanical modulation of the brake lever. I feel like any car with power to the rear removes the necessity for such things unless you're in the middle of a rally stage--but WRC cars aren't RWD anyway so it's all moot. At the end of the day, I prefer more console space and less clutter over something I never use in the first place.

Agreed!

A bit over 11 years ago, I wrote a very brief review of an LS-8 rental: i-just-drove-a-surprisingly-good-car-t87589.html where I mentioned that I found the electronic parking brake to be very convenient! (I had owned my current M45 about a year at that point ...)

Z