Lusso Duo

It was obvious that after re-upholstering the Quadrifoglio steering wheel, the gearbox shifter should be next - simply because otherwise there is a gap in the center console. The regular shifter has black stitching, The Quadrifoglio one is red only. My Lusso Quadrifoglio steering wheel has beige.

The first problem was that there are not so many used facelift shifters available on the market. You can find a lot of them at a reasonable price for pre-facelift Giulia/Stelvio, but not facelift ones. The prices on facelifted shifters are 2-3-4 times higher, depending on the seller's greed. The red-stitched shifters prices are blowing my mind completely. How could this cost $500? However, I was able to find a black one for a reasonable price of $112.

The next issue I faced was that I couldn't find any how-to guidelines on disassembling the facelift gearbox shifter anywhere. It seems like I'm the first one who decided to reupholster it and therefore needed to disassemble - unless I simply couldn't found any videos or guidelines on the internet. Because of that, I decided to tear it down completely to understand how it works, including the lower part with the bolts. That was unnecessary though. because I was not able to remove the stick itself.

Ok, removing the shifter lower part didn't help. What about the upper part? Knowing that our car is equipped with a ZF transmission, and that the shifter is probably pretty similar to other cars that use it, BMW in particular, I decided to look up videos on how BMW shifters are disassembled. Particularly, this video helped:

According to the video, the glass on the shifter can be simply popped up using the plastic pry tools. Under it, there a couple of bolts that can be unscrewed to remove the electronic components.

Even after that, I still was not able to remove the stick. However, it was enough for me to remove the old leather from the shifter, so I could finally re-upholster it.

My original shifter was wrapped in perforated leather. I know that sometimes you can see shifter in just smooth leather. I could do both, but decided to stick to the original I have, and just change the stitching color.

Now, the stitching pattern. The gearbox shifter, whether Quadrifoglio or regular one, uses the same type of stitching - sport. As I described before, during the steering wheel upholstery I used cross stitching, which I prefer more for various reasons. I totally understand nobody cares or even notice the difference in stitching patterns, but I deliberately decided to use the same type of stitching in order to match the one on the steering wheel.

See the two shifters side by side. The leather I used is exactly the same as used by Alfa Romeo. I'm super satisfied with the outcome. When the upholstery was completed, I needed to swap the shifters. Luckily, there are many videos available on YouTube for that. Just one thing left, is adaptation in MES. Since this shifter is a used one, I didn't have to program it, just adaptation.

And the final result. Now the interior looks complete. Beige stitching on the steering wheel and gearbox shifter matches the same on the doors. Perfect combination. To be honest, after installing the shifter, it feels like it was here all the time.

As a bonus, I also applied cloth tape to the sunroof guide rails to get rid of the rattling sounds coming from there. Nothing extraordinary, just make a luxury car even more luxurious.

That's all I wanted to share, Thanks to everyone for reading. Stay safe and love your cars!

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