This is the single most annoying - and potentially dangerous - thing about new cars

We've started to notice a theme in many of the new cars and trucks, including SUVs, that we test out here at Business Insider on our Transportation team: confusing automatic-transmission shifters.

We're not talking about stick-shifts here; those are still, mercifully, relatively straightforward.

But the good old park-reverse-neutral-drive setups of old, when you simply moved a shifter up and down, have given way to more elaborate systems. In some cases, such as when the shifter is replaced by buttons, this isn't so bad.

But when the shifter is modified to be more of a joystick-type interface, it doesn't always make sense and requires practice to sort out.

Sometimes it doesn't get sorted out, as was reportedly the case when actor Anton Yelchin, who played Mr. Chekov in the rebooted "Star Trek"movies, was killed in a freak accident in Los Angeles when he thought his Jeep was in park when it was in neutral. The car rolled, pinning him against his mailbox.

Fiat Chrysler Automobiles had recalled Yelchin's model, along with over 1 million others, because of a confusing shifter design.

So in some cases, these new shifter designs are more than an annoyance - they're a danger.