Ford’s Fake Shifter Patent Doubles Down On The Worst Trend In Modern EVs

Smooth, uniform power delivery is one of the best parts of driving an EV, but some drivers hate good things. They’re too terrified of change to ever get past swapping jets in their carburetors, but they’re also prospective buyers — buyers that automakers are targeting with fake shifts programmed to interrupt the otherwise blissful experience of electric power. Hyundai and BMW have already jumped on this dumb trend, but it seems Ford wants to outdo them both: Designing a manual transmission for its future EVs. 

The Drive spotted a patent application from Ford, originally filed back in 2023, for a traditional H-pattern manual shifter for use on electric vehicles. If this has you thinking that EVs generally only have one or occasionally two gears, which don’t exactly form the minimum number of points necessary for an H shape, you’re right. The idea here isn’t actually to shift gears, but to give the driver the experience of shifting gears. For some reason. 

Ford’s patent application does offer one prospective use case that has at least some functionality — changing drive modes — but even that is surely better accomplished by a mechanism that takes up less space in your center console. Even within that use case, though, this stick is routinely referred to as a shifter. Shifting is simply not an experience that benefits EVs, not something they need to drag forward from the era of internal combustion. 

EVs are like vegan food. They’re fantastic when taken as they are — who doesn’t love falafel? — but they’re poor imitators when they try to be something they’re not. Let EVs be EVs, and they’ll wow you with power uninterrupted power delivery and one-pedal driving — experiences no ICE vehicle can match. Interrupt what makes them great in service of bringing back feelings from the Good Ol Days, though, and you’ll find a whole that’s less than the sum of its parts.