[impish9208]

> Will Clayton, a 33-year-old Greenville, S.C. resident who works in finance, frequently rents cars when he travels for work. On one such trip, he was put off by the gearshift in a Chrysler Pacifica minivan: a silver dial that he thought was placed way too close to the radio’s volume knob. He wondered whether any user had tried to turn down the volume only to end up going in reverse.

“I can’t think of any consumer push for a radical change in gear-shifters,” he said. “I’ve heard of reinventing the wheel. I have not heard of reinventing the shifter. Whose idea was this?”

Genesis , the luxury brand owned by South Korea’s Hyundai Motor , made what the company calls the Crystal Sphere for the GV60 electric sport-utility vehicle, which the company has described as a piece of automotive art. The glass ball sits in the center console and glows when the owner approaches the car—a bit like a fancy snow globe—rotating 180 degrees upside down when the vehicle is turned on to reveal a twist-knob shifter.

Genesis’s European division last year put out a nearly four-minute video explaining how the orb works.

One driver said they’d put a reminder on a Post-it note to run an errand and stuck it in the console, partly touching the Crystal Sphere.

“When I turned off the car, it grabbed the paper and pulled it inside,” they wrote in an online forum last summer. “Now when I turn on or off the car, I can hear the paper. Can’t really see it anymore.”