Hi, while cruising along the highway, while moving my sports bag from the back to the front seat, I accidentally slammed the gear lever into PARK.

It came to a gradual stop as if I was using firm braking (but I didn;t use my brakes as I was dumbfounded).

No lock up or juddering.

The car still drives, no strange noises or smells.

Should I be taking any maintenance action?

 

Does your car accelerate fine?

 

what car was this in?

Autos usually have a button you needa push to engage another gear, an gate shifters move in different directions.

 

i think you will be fine :]. my lexus friend use to do that a lot. but the car came out fine. just make sure you dont do it anymore. it puts stress on your tranny. im pretty sure you hear a loud clickin noise to

 

worst case scenario you break off the park engagement pin and the car will never stay in one spot when you turn it off in park... it'll be like being in neutral all the time...

just don't do it again

 

Car accelerates ok I guess - not noticeably different - what should I look out for?

It is an IS250 2006/2007.

No button or gate, just slid into park very easily at highway speed.

PARK still works fine. I have tried pushing it while stationary in PARK with the p.brk off. it seems to rock a bit.

Anyway i'm wondering if Toyota Corp designed the car to use the PARK gear to act as a backup emergency brake?

Surely otheriwise, they would have made it harder for the lever to be bumped into PARK

 

Sounds mechanically impossible.

 

it actually is not possible for anything to go wrong. this was on mythbusters. lol. it was a car special.

putting the car in park or reverse while its above a certain mph doesnt do anything because the car knows that it was an incorrect action. on the car they drove (looked like a 90s to early 2000s ford taurus), they did that and only the check engine light came out, and the car didnt even feel like it was braking.

 

Thanks for the info. Have had a look online. Surprised I missed that episode.

 

I hope this never happens to me, and I won't try it to see what happens. I had an experience with my old 1983 Ford Econoline Van years ago. I had a sticky accelerator pedal, and once I pushed it down a bit while shifting into "drive". It was a stupid thing to do, but I paid for it.

It all happened so fast. Next thing I knew, the transmission shifted into forward, and snapped the driveshaft and the front nose of the old 9 inch differential. That was an expensive lesson. 90 weight gear oil, driveshaft and differential parts went flying everywhere.

Some folks at Ford said that the transmission was NOT supposed to go into gear at any engine speed above idle...WRONG!

Lesson learned for me.

 

hm, I tried putting the car (not mine, and not my friends) in reverse once while I was going 30mph, all it did was stall the car.

 

yeah. my bro did that to our 1990 corolla... 25mph then park. sounded nasty

 

Actually you have to take a look at what's wrong because your car shouldn't shift fron drive to park without pushing the button.
Mine doesn't even move out of park if the key is not in the ignition.
And youre lucky you shifted into park and not reverse but I think since these cars transmissions are electronicly controlled by the ECU the ECu will block the tranny to prevente damage.
If not your gonna wind up with tranny parts allover the road that happened to a friend of mine once.

 

haha, this reminds me of when my friend rented a dodge charger and he drove down the street at 40mph, and he slammed it into P. car grinded to a halt, and we just started laughing.

 

Read the thread--there's no button.