Looks pretty intuitive to me.
Or is it like an F-16 side stick controller and doesn’t actually move?
Gotta be smarter than the gear lever, I guess. You should see the gear selector on the V6 Acuras. Just a kind of rocker switch.
Why do they continue to waste precious real estate by putting the shifters over the center hump?
Dual-clutch paddle shifters are equivalent, but faster; in F1 nobody uses anything else, and nobody remains who right-foot brakes. The current Mustang and Fusion have those as options along with a bunch of Euro cars. There are a few consumer cars (Honda Fit is one, or was) which have paddles but aren't dual clutch. That nightmare is like a creaky newbie using a manual shifter, except that you, the driver, have no idea when the next gear will actually engage. H-style manuals are fun, and heel-toe blips are a fine art, but they're still slower than sequentials. Sorry, purists! However, the disaster in the above post is absolute trash, designed no doubt by focus group to be 'cool' like an sequential shifter but where the marketing guys quaked in fear that their target audience would flee at the thought of *actually* shifting.