Electric Vehicle Gear Shifter - 20cm

A three position lever gear selector for electric vehicle conversions, with a 20 cm lever and a hard anodised aluminium body. It gives the driver a reverse, neutral and drive gate that feels like a gearchange, and gives the motor controller three plain switched signals.

The body mounts under the floor or the console on four M6 bolts and the lever comes up through a slot in the panel, so nothing but the lever and its knob is visible from the cabin. It is the honest answer to the awkward question in a classic conversion: the original gear lever no longer has a gearbox to operate, and a row of buttons on the transmission tunnel looks like an afterthought.

How it signals. There is no CAN bus and nothing to configure. Each of the three positions closes its own wire to ground and the other two stay open, so the controller sees exactly one direction input at a time. That suits any controller with separate forward, reverse and neutral inputs, and it fails safe: a broken wire reads as that position simply not being selected rather than as a false one. Check that your controller expects a ground switched input rather than a voltage on the pin, because this shifter supplies no power of its own.

Key specifications

Wiring

The same table is in the Documents tab as an image you can take to the car.

Features

• A real lever with a defined gate, so the driver gets the feel of selecting a direction rather than pressing a button
• Three separate switched outputs, one per position, which suits controllers with discrete direction inputs and needs no configuration
• Hard anodised aluminium body, built to sit under a floor where it will meet damp and grit
• Mounts entirely below the panel on four M6 bolts, so only the lever shows in the cabin
• Supplied with its knob and a flying lead, so nothing else has to be sourced to test it on the bench

Compatibility

Suits any motor controller or vehicle control unit with separate forward, reverse and neutral inputs that are switched to ground.

Choose the length by how deep the mount sits. This shifter and the 28 cm version are the same part with a different lever, at the same price. The 20 cm lever suits a mounting point close to where the knob needs to sit, such as a console, a raised bracket or a shallow tunnel. Where the body has to go under the floor and the lever still has to reach a comfortable height, take the 28 cm instead. Measure from the face of your mounting panel to where you want the top of the knob, and pick the lever that lands there.

Cutting the panel needs a 14.5 mm slot for the lever and four M6 clearance holes on a 38 x 40 mm rectangle. The mounting drawing in the Documents tab is dimensioned for marking out.

In the box

• 1 x gear shifter with the knob fitted
• Flying lead with a 6 way connector

Mounting bolts and the mating connector housing are not included. A replacement or alternative knob is available separately.

Downloads

The wiring pinout, the dimensioned mounting drawing and a STEP model are all in the Documents tab above. Between them they cover everything needed to cut the panel, plan the space and wire the shifter in. The 3D model on this page is the same geometry.