Fewer than one in five Americans are able to drive a manual transmission vehicle, so simply owning a classic car with a stick shift is enough to keep most thieves from starting it up and driving it away, at least in the United States. A more antiquated version of the manual transmission is the column shift, or “three on the tree,” where the shift lever is on the steering column instead of to the right of the driver’s knees. This mechanism was common on cars in the 1940s and ’50s but was eventually phased out in favor of floor-mounted shifters.
Many thieves might not be able to back a column-shift vehicle out of your driveway, making this type of transmission a built-in anti-theft device. From 1938 to 1948, Chevrolet vehicles, like the ’38 Master Deluxe pictured above, used a floor-mounted foot starter switch. This button-style starter will likely frustrate most thieves, who will waste time looking frantically around in the dark for a keyed or pushbutton ignition switch like the ones found on most classic cars. A 1954 Austin-Healey has a few standard “anti-theft” features: no outside door handles, a push-button starter, and a stick shift transmission.
[Featured Image by Brian.Burnell via Wikimedia Commons| Cropped and scaled | CC-By 3.0]
