I do. I drive the mailbox to pick up the mail. I stop, put the car in Park, and shut off the ignition. I have never spaced this out in 43 years of driving. And if my phone rings, I let it. That’s what voicemail is for.
You spaced it out one time out of 6000. That means you remembered at least 5999 times. And I’ll bet you don’t forget again.
Well, OK, I’m not disputing that, although in 35 years of driving I don’t think I’ve ever done that.
Well, in my case it’s also the great difficulty of doing what you describe. I’m not very tall, and I’m positive that it’s simply impossible for me to have one foot out of my pick-up, on the ground, and the other on the brake, for reasons having to do with how high the truck sits and the (lack of) length of my inseam.
In my car I might be able to do this, but as I said, it would be incredibly awkward and unbalanced. Even if I’m leaving the car for only “a few seconds” I pretty much have to be either all the way in or all the way out. So maybe it’s a problem for people taller than me.
I was 4-wheeling/jeeping/off roading with a friend and he had his truck run over him.
I was behind him in another truck. Slick muddy trail. He got stuck trying to go uphill and stepped out. Now I can’t recall if he forgot to put it in park, or ALMOST got it in park and put it in reverse. Anyway, he stepped out, slid under the vehicle and the front left tire of his half ton 1974 Chevy ran over his chest. Of course there where few if any warning buzzers back then. But I’ll tell you what, he never did it again. 
Kidding aside, My friend came out of it with some broken ribs and a lacerated spleen. Luckily, we where not too far from a hospital, but a lot of it was off road.
I can see the OP’s point. And other good points made. But I really don’t want my car ‘thinking’ for me more than it does. Though, I will say that my Wifes new 2016 Outback has some very cool features. Can we trust them? Will people depend on them too much? How much will it cost to fix them. Jury is still out on that.
The Jeep Patriot passenger side plastic cracked up. Before I got around to calling my insurance company I hit a deer and cracked up the driver’s side.
I hated that car soooo much that I just traded it in at that point. The guy at the dealership walked around my trade-in and asked (jokingly) how much I’d give him to take it.
Hence the grin at the end. It’s much more amusing my way.
kayaker, that’s pretty funny. I had a Cherokee many moons ago and I loved it but I just can’t love the newer iteration of smaller Jeeps. If it has a FWD option it’s not really a Jeep IMO.
As an addendum to the OP, does this occur in cvt cars as well? I don’t have a lot of experience with them and I’m curious. Do they have a torque converter the same as a “standard” automatic.
I don’t understand the vitriol aimed at the OP. Yes, this is driver error, and it’s rare. But it does happen, often enough for there to be dozens and dozens of youtube videos of this happening. There are lots of driver errors that cars are now overriding control for, same as airplanes and heavy machinery and anything else where simple software changes can save lives.
Most modern cars have door sensors, brake pedal switches, ABS (which includes wheel speed sensors) and computers controlling the automatic transmission. It would be absolutely trivial to have a series of inputs (door open, no foot on brake, car in gear, wheels not turning) to trigger a slow braking event to make sure a car doesn’t roll. I’d go so far to say that in 10 years, this behavior will just be normal. The only thing holding automakers back is the fact that embedded systems testing is necessarily rigorous, so they probably want to make absolutely sure they’ve got it right. But seriously, if they can make a car automatically stop to prevent rear-ending a truck on the highway, they can certainly make a car automatically stop to prevent driving over grandma’s foot.
yes, in general CVTs have a torque converter. the exception would be the eCVT designs used in hybrid cars.
FWIW, you’re right about this: I don’t very often have a situation where I have to leave the car for a few seconds (and now I’m wondering how common this is). On the rare occasions when I do, it makes me nervous enough that I’m careful to put the car in Park and apply the parking brake before leaving the car. If I did have to do it regularly, would I become nonchalant about it and regularly forget, or would the whole thing become habitual, making me less likely to forget?
I’ve only ever driven an automatic car a couple of times, but manual cars will also drive themselves with no foot on the pedal. If the engine idles relatively high then as long as you let the clutch out very gently, and you’re not on an uphill gradient, it won’t stall.
I see that as a feature and not a bug. Easy to creep ahead a few feet in a traffic jam or in a fast food drive through.
Yeah, this is the main reason “why they haven’t come up a way to prevent it”: because millions of drivers take it for granted that it’s the way cars work, and that it’s useful for them to work that way.
To be fair, the request is for an open door interlock, which isn’t a horrible idea. But every new feature has costs that need to be justified, and the benefits have to outweigh the damage they can cause when they fail. We have several interlocks on cars right now that can be justified on those grounds.
The question on the table here is does a door/park interlock make sense, and how would you implement it.
How are you going to fake an accidental death without jumping out of the car before it drives over the cliff??!!
I must apologize for a lot of the confusion in this thread. When I was creating it, I was only thinking of the dangerous case where the driver leaves the car with it still in gear and I phrased the title and OP with that in mind. I wasn’t thinking of the typical use of the behavior. Clearly there is the safe and useful aspect of the creeping feature when you need to inch the car forward slowly.
In my (older) car there is no warning of the dangerous condition when you exit the car with it in drive–no bells, no special lights, etc. It seems like there is great potential for harm either to either the driver who may hit by the car or to any person/thing in front of the car. I was wondering why the car manufactures were able to get away with this huge liability risk. It sounds like newer cars may have added some type of special warning system to alert the driver, which now insulates the car makers from liability.
Presumably you have to take off your seat belt in order to exit the car. Does an alarm sound when your seat belt is unbuckled?
You’ve assumed here that the liability risk to manfacturers is “huge,” but you have presented no evidence for this. In your own experience, these sorts of mishaps are rare (and IME, they never happen). Even if someone does get injured/killed because they tried to climb out of the car while it was still in gear, they (or their kin) may elect not to sue the manufacturer. Absent any evidence to support your assertion, it’s possible that these sorts of lawsuits are very rare and/or easily crushed by the manufacturer’s legal team, which would explain why they haven’t bothered to implement the safety measures you propose.
Upthread you suggested the cost would be “negligible,” but the fact is that manufacturers obsess over pennies when considering the per-vehicle cost of design changes. Add in the liability if the warning system fails in service and someone gets injured because of it.
TL,DR: the costs/risks associated with implementing this safety measure likely outweigh the risks associated with not implementing it.
Nope. There’s just the initial beep when first getting in the car. When the car’s running, I can both unbuckle and open the door and only the standard dash indicators for seat belt and open door light up–no bells or alarms.
For reference, this is a 99 BMW. I also think my 96 Pathfinder was the same. I have newer cars, but they are manual (not auto), and I haven’t experimented to see what sort of warnings they have.
I believe all the warning bells you are looking for exist on most modern cars.
You have to rig up some sort of jumper that keeps the switch electrically closed, so that the car never sees it open. And you have to connect a long string to it so that you can yank it loose, to remove the evidence. And you should buckle your seatbelt behind you when you get in, because cars these days have black box data recorders that would reveal anomalies like an unbuckled seatbelt.
Oh, and no jewelry, like a bracelet that could get caught on a control stalk, just wear shorts and a t-shirt.
It’s actually pretty darn hard to open a car door against the wind at any appreciable speed.
Just leave the window down & dive out that way. No need to cobble together something to fool the computer about open doors.