shift lever not coming out of park

Greetings,

Does this appear to happen when the vehicle is parked on a slight incline? If so then you most likely have a slight deformity of the parking pawl, a small locking tab that sets into one of the gear teeth in your tranny whenever you put it in Park. Sometimes when there is some wear or damage to the parking pawl it may be difficult (or near impossible) to shift out of park while there is tension on it from an incline.

The next time this happens, try sticking your foot (carefully) out the door and rocking the vehicle back and forth while trying to move the gear selector out of park. You just may find that at a certain point it will release easily and shift into gear.

If this is the case, you can help reduce the problem by firmly setting the parking brake before shifing out of gear and into Park before you shut the car off. When you get into it again, shift back into gear before releasing the parking brake. This will not fix the problem (only a tranny shop can do that) but it's not so critical of an issue that you need to spend a wad of cash immediately to have it repaired.

Cheers - Jonathan

No. We thought that at first. But is not the case. Sometimes it will release perfectly smooth and other times not, even when on flat terrain. It also seems to happen most during the heat of the day. It just happened this last Saturday. We moved the truck in the early A.M., but when we went to move it again around 4, again at 8 & 9P.M. we couldn't get it to shift. But, we waited until almost 11P.M. when it was cooler and lo & behold, it shifted very easily.