Remember the Mitsubishi Mirage with Super-Shift ?
Besides the regular gear stick, it had an additional stick to select “Power” or “Economy” mode, effectively providing 8 Forward & 2 Reverse speeds (gear ratios, to be precise). The idea was to endow the driver with optimum gearing ratios for a wider range of driving mood swings, from “garang” to “jimat”.
However in practice, to savor the sweet renderings from every one of the 8 ratios would require two hands to manipulate the two sticks at the same time ! So almost every driver would just choose either one of the two modes (Power or Economy) and then just left it there.
The 70s-80s was a decade of bold innovations by automakers. But only a few worked. In this case, Mitsubishi realized their Mirage was a mirage.
