a lot of cars now, actually most cars use an automatic gear shift. P - Park R - Reverse N - Neutral D - Drive L - Low Gear
Looks like your question has been answered There are manual shift cars in America but autos are a lot more common there as compared to European countries. In fact, most cars here seem to be manual anyway, probably explaining why you didn't know about auto! There's lots of variations of it really... There's paddle stick manual, manual sequential, manual stick shift, then there's auto too... But yeah, I won't go too in-depth - auto just has a point where the gear gets to a certain amount of revs and then switches up or down, depending on how high or low the revs are