The Surprising Truth Behind the ‘E’ on Your Car’s Gear Stick Revealed!
Ever noticed that mysterious ‘E’ on some gear sticks and wondered what on earth it’s for? You’re not alone—most car folks recognize the familiar numbers and the trusty ‘R’ for reverse, but that elusive ‘E’ often flies under the radar. While automatics parade their ‘P’, ‘N’, ‘D’, and ‘R’ like badges of honor, the ‘E’ was a sneaky little guest star on older manual cars, standing for ‘Economy’. Imagine a gear designed to keep your engine purring softly, saving fuel by dialing down revs and even silencing some cylinders—quite the thrifty sidekick back in the day! But sadly, with modern engines getting ever so efficient, that ‘E’ has pretty much vanished, like a rare car legend fading into extinction. Now, if you hear ‘E’ these days, it usually means something electric is charging ahead, leaving the classic stick shift in the dust. Makes you wonder—will future drivers even know what it meant to wrestle with a gear stick, or will that too become a quaint relic of motoring’s past? How long before gear sticks become as obsolete as cassette tapes? Dive into the curious case of the ‘E’ on gear sticks and what it tells us about the future of driving. LEARN MORE
Some people are finding out why some gear sticks have the letter ‘E’ on them alongside the usual suspects of numbers and letters.
Most people’s gear sticks will be an ascending series of numbers and an ‘R’ for reverse when they need to scoot the car backwards, so plenty of folks have never seen an ‘E’.
Automatic drivers will be familiar with ‘P’, ‘N’, ‘D’ and ‘R’, and perhaps also ‘L’, that’s ‘Park’, ‘Neutral’, ‘Drive’, ‘Reverse’ and then ‘Low’ if you need it, but again no ‘E’ on there.
Supercar Blondie asked their audience if they knew what it was and some wise motorists stumped up the solution, which isn’t something you’ll get with modern cars, as it’s ‘E’ for ‘Economy’.
Basically, if you hop behind the wheel of an an older car it might have an ‘E’ gear which will still work like a top gear but try and save a bit of fuel consumption on the car as it keeps engine revs low, reduces RPM and might also shut down some cylinders.
It’s something you won’t have seen on cars for a long time (Reddit/DOMSPIROS)
However, these days it might as well be ‘E’ for ‘Extinct’ since greater fuel efficiencies in modern car engines mean it was a very short-lived addition to the gearstick and that’s why so many people no longer see it.
If you’re hearing the letter ‘E’ in relation to cars nowadays it typically denotes that it’s an electric car, and they all drive like automatics so there’s no need for anything other than a basic gear stick.
That’s even if it is a stick as well, plenty of newer car models go for a simpler switch which you set like you’re trying to pilot the USS Enterprise.
It might be the fancy future of motoring but there’s something that’s not quite the same without a stick to shift.
The motoring world is slowly but surely becoming more electric which means a generation or two from now you can forget about people not knowing what the ‘E’ on a gear stick meant, they won’t even know there was a stick at all.
Modern cars don’t even have a knob you can grab (Getty Stock Photo)
There’s growing competition in the electric car market and various governments have mandated that the sale of petrol and diesel cars needs to end by a certain point, effectively cutting off the supply of new models in the market.
That won’t immediately spell an end to petrol cars, they’ll still be circulating around for many years afterwards as they go from first-hand models to being traded down the buyer’s chain but eventually they’ll be phased out.
Put it this way, 20 years ago the Ford Focus was the most popular car sold in the UK, but how many of those cars are still on Britain’s roads today?
Of those that are still running, how long have they got left before they get fed into the crusher and sent into that big car park in the sky?
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