While I worked at the Sears Pointless 24 Hours of LeMons race at Sonoma Raceway in California a few weeks ago, a group of local car collectors brought some of their more unusual machinery and staged an impromptu car show in the paddock. There was an Amphicar, a Toyota Sports 800, and what appeared to be the cleanest Renault 16 in North America. This car was a French-market TX model, with an amazing five-on-the-tree column-shifted manual transmission.

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While most Detroit cars were available with three-on-the-tree column-shifted manual transmissions from the 1930s through the 1960s (with this layout remaining as an option into the middle 1980s on American full-sized pickup trucks), and four-on-the-tree manuals were common on European cars (and a few forward-control Detroit vans), five-speed column-shift manuals are unusual.

Alfa Romeo, Citroën, and even Wartburg (if you believe that an overdrive gear tacked onto a column-shifted four-speed qualifies, that is) used them, and Toyota and Nissan offered five-on-the-tree shifters in some taxis and vans for the Japanese home market. Is six-on-the-tree ever going to happen? We hope so.

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