I was just out in my car, it started up fine, I forgot something in the house and it won’t shift bark into park. The indicator says park, but it’s stuck in reverse. What could the problem be and how should I go about shutting it off? Put it in neutral?
Type and year of car would be helpful.
You could probably put it in neutral and engage the e-brake to shut it off.
I had a '85 Firebird that had issues with going into park. It turned out that the shift cable mount had come loose where it attached to the tranny. All it took was tightening up a couple of bolts.
To shut it off, you can always just turn the key to off, but if you’ve got a column shift, you might not be able to remove the keys if the column shift mechanism doesn’t think it’s in park. Set the parking brake and the car should be able to stay in one place.
One way or another, you need to get it into neutral or park, or you’ll not be able to re-start the engine.
Beyond that, we’d need to know what kind of car you’ve got.
It’s a 1993 Accord
Okay, this may be stupid, but this sort of happened to me once. I tried to put my automatic shifter in Park but it wouldn’t go. I tried several times before noticing that a small rock had dropped in the track and was preventing the shifter to go into park all the way. I took the rock out and everything was fine.
Well it’s not that, the shifter went all the way up. I had some success with putting it into first and then switching to park, but after a bit that stopped working and now neither neutral or reverse works either. It’s currently being towed.
The same thing happened to my 1988 Accord. It was stuck in drive and even if I moved the automatic shifter (which moved just fine) the tranny stayed in drive. I drove it to the repair shop, turned it off, and put a note on the wheel to keep some repair guy from thinking they could back it up.
It was a broken linkage from the shifter to the transmission.