Borgward Shift Stick Gear Knob Borgward BX7

It is also referred to as a "gear stick," "gear lever," "gearshift," or "shifter" because it is a metal lever that is connected to a car's transmission. Transmission lever is its formal name. While a manual gearbox employs the shift lever, an automatic transmission has a similar lever known as the "gear selector."

Gear sticks are most commonly found between the front seats of the vehicle, either on the center console , the transmission tunnel, or directly on the floor. , In automatic transmission cars, the lever functions more like a gear selector, and, in modern cars, does not necessarily need to have a shifting linkage due to its shift-by-wire principle. It has the added benefit of allowing for a full width bench-type front seat . It has since fallen out of favor, although it can still be found widely on North American-market pick-up trucks, vans, emergency vehicles. A dashboard mounted shift was common on certain French models such as the Citroën 2CV and Renault 4. Both the Bentley Mark VI and the Riley Pathfinder had their gear lever to the right of the right-hand drive driver's seat, alongside the driver's door, where it was not unknown for British cars to also have their handbrake.

In some modern sports cars, the gear lever has been replaced entirely by "paddles", which are a pair of levers, usually operating electrical switches (rather than a mechanical connection to the gearbox), mounted on either side of the steering column, where one increments the gears up, and the other down. Formula 1 cars used to hide the gear stick behind the steering wheel within the nose bodywork before the modern practice of mounting the "paddles" on the (removable) steering wheel itself.