Cars - For Car Enthusiasts

The real shift patterns are like this:

They look complicated but it's not too bad when you get used to the idea. In normal use it's basically a four speed H pattern with two different ways to increase the number of gears. You have a range selector to give you 8 main gears (you shift 1 through four in low range then flip to high range and move back to 1 position to give 5 through 8) and then you have a splitter that gives every gear a high and low ratio (in order you'd go 1st low -> 1st high -> 2nd low -> 2nd high -> etc). Normally you don't need to use all the gears so you can skip some of the sequence - particularly when lightly loaded. Lo position is a particularly low ratio, and reverse is as per normal except you can split it to have a somewhat faster or slower reverse gear.

I'll admit I haven't driven a full 18 speed but I've driven 9 speeds with a range selector and a 10 speed with a splitter and both were easy enough to learn so combining the two doesn't seem as daunting as it might be to those who haven't tried either.