My Mustang GT has a manual transmission. My sons Mustang deluxe is an automatic.
I did some work on it and test drove it the other day. Like most automatic transmission cars you have to step on the brake and press a button on the gear shifter to shift from park to drive or reverse.
But what I find odd is, when you are in drive in order to shift it into neutral you also have to push in that button. Every other automatic car I’ve owned and/or driven would pop into neutral directly from drive, but would not, of course, shift into any other gear without pushing the button.
It seems to me this could be a safety issue. Say someone has a stuck accelerator and needs to go into neutral quickly. Also, by requiring the button to be pushed to shift to neutral it opens the possibility one could shift too far past neutral and into reverse, screwing up the tranny.
What’s the deal? Why would Ford design this like that?
It seems to have been set up to work that way. I’ll give the boy a call and have him look in the owners maual and see if it says anything about it. (I should have done that when I noticed it!:smack: )
I think my Kia Soul behaves this way as well. I’m assuming the 'Stang has a console shift. Those things are easily knocked out of Drive if someone puts something like a purse or take-out food on the console, and a hard stop pushes the stuff forward against the gear selector.
(Hmmm… how do they know this?)
As the OP says, I’ve never seen an auto that couldn’t be moved between N and D without having to press the safety button. I’ve had two that had manual shift options and those, too, would move from D to N or sideways into the manual arc without any lock. As much of my experience is on Ford products (and Volvos, during the Ford era), I have trouble believing Ford would suddenly change this… but maybe.