Touché! It's interesting how early vehicles were very different in their controls, but seemed to mostly converge and stabilise for a few decades, before again diverging and changing rapidly.
The Model T (Ford) had a throttle on the steering wheel and 3 pedals, but not the ones you'd expect today:
Congress didn’t “mandate” it, they made it such that the federal government could only buy vehicles that used the PRND sequence for auto transmissions. If you don’t want any corporate welfare you can make your transmission shift in any order you feel like.
