Chrysler cars acting like Christine

Back in the 1970s or 1980s, Ford vehicles had a similar problem. The organization I worked for at the time had a directive issued that the vehicles were not to be left running and in Park unless the emergency brake was engaged. I know of two instances where the vehicles did in fact jump out of park and have minor accidents.

How much are you willing to wager that the statement "vehicle could shift out of park without the key in the ignition" referring to a Chrysler car today has anything at all to do with a Ford that was left running back in the 70's or 80's.

-jim

If so, "Plus =E7a gear changer." Their 1960s models with the Cruise-o- Matic transmission would easily slip from Park into Reverse -- "easily" means, for instance, "when you close the door" -- as a couple of parts in the linkage got some wear on 'em. The more luxurious ones additionally had an automatic parking-brake releaser that went into action when you shifted out of Park... or, more accurately, when the shifter left Park -- removing your last line of defense. Given that these cars often weighed 4000+ pounds and were powered by enormous V8's, they took some stopping once they got going in this fashion!

That latter "feature" remained in certain big fat FoMoCo products long after the problematic linkage and the Cast-Iron Cruise-O were both history. A few years ago, in a hillside parking lot at a shopping mall near me, someone got lesson in this, somewhere in the gray area between slapstick comedy and tragedy. A middle-aged driver, his parents in the back seat, found that the automatic parking brake release in his big 80s-vintage Lincoln was stuck. He got out and knelt by the open driver's door to get at the emergency release latch. I am not sure whether the car was supposedly in Park and jumped out of it, or was in a running gear, at that time. When he released the brake, the car went on the move, faster and faster, and his ability to get back in and put a stop to it was hobbled by the fact that it had run over his foot during its escape. The car went over about a five-foot embankment and came to rest. Nobody was badly hurt (well, I guess his pride was injured severely and family politics became interesting) but the "Jaws of Life" had to be used to get the back-seat passengers out, and judging from the newspaper picture, I'm guessing that the unibody was beyond economically practical repair anyway.

Nowadays most or all automatic transmission cars seem to require that you step on the brake pedal (the real "service brake," not the parking aka emergency brake) to take it out of Park. Recently I almost failed to get a Kia Spectra out of the rent-a-car parking lot because of this. Turned out you had to mash that sucker, not merely step on it, to release the shift lever. Such an interlock wouldn't have kept the aforementioned Lincoln from leaping forth, but it probably does solve a lot of problems along these lines.

One of them is kids playing with the shift lever -- I was once one of two, then three people pushing uphill on a big old Dodge station wagon rolling downhill toward a supermarket's windows, a delighted four-year-old behind the wheel. Fortunately this unsustainably Sisyphean effort soon recruited one more person, who managed to get in and stomp on the brake and put the transmission back into Park.

Toyotas, of course, do not seem prone to such engineering gaffes -- but it is a timely reminder that even if a car wants a bit of warmup as you wield your ice scraper, leaving a running vehicle unattended is never quite safe... nor is leaving your kids alone in the car. Some problems are best addressed with attentiveness and taking that extra moment to do things "right," no matter how good the technology.

Safety first,

--Joe

Nothing "supposed" about the Ford issue. I had a '68 Ranchero for

*years* and the whole time I had it it would drop out of park if you slammed the door too hard. The detent mechanism would wear down and get sloppy. The other symptom was that you had to manually hold the gear shift lever (column mount) up into "Park" in order to start the car. If you didn't it would drop slightly down and the starter interlock switch would disengage. If you ever watch any '70s TV shows where they drove Fords, you could see the actors all adopting the "Ford position" to start the cars- left hand reaching across the top of the steering column to lift up on the shift lever, right hand turning the key. It became second nature to everyone that drove aging Fords from that era- when I switched over to driving my '73 Plymouth it took me a few months to get out of the habit.

The saddest thing to me about that whole deal was that it represented the first mass appearance of the nanny-generation. People had been driving aging Fords with that quirk for probably 15 years before some goober was dumb enough to not set the parking brake, and first thing you knew the lawsuits were flying. All because people are too dumb to protect THEMSELVES and feel that the car should do it for them.

Obviously he didn't (no surprise, if you've followed his trolling for any time at all), since nowhere does it say they can "shift out of park on their own." Unlike the 60s-70s Ford case, this is merely the interlock that prevents shifting out of park without the key turned to "on." More of an anti-theft device than a safety device, really. Someone STILL has to manually take the car out of "Park."

If you know the exact part and failure mechanism involved, you can immediately conclude that the article is WRONG in saying that. It SHOULD say "the vehicle could BE SHIFTED out of park..." because a human still has to press the button (or pull the lever) to get past the park detent (not the failure point here as it was in the Ford cases) and move the shifter into a gear. Gravity and vibration cannot do so in this case.

Which is even more blatantly incorrect than the article.

NO news channel is "conservative" in any way shape or form. Nor are most accurate where technical information is involved. Copy editors grossly oversimplify and usually render the final verbiage outright WRONG, as has clearly happened here.

Everyone that "should be aware" of that recall has already received a notice from Chrysler, not from our resident rec.autos.tech troll. I have (and I blew it off, because I hate that particular interlock anyway. Cars didn't use to even HAVE it, and it never caused any difficulties at all.) Now if it had been a fuel or brake system recall or something important, that would have been a different story.

Jim's dead-nuts right. No "if" at all, big or small.