So my vague idea of shifting to reverse to stop the car in an emergency if my brakes ever failed wouldn’t work? (I always figured that if it came down to wrecking the transmission versus wrecking the whole car, the tranny goes!)
Nope.
:D:D:D
I don’t know, everything just seems funny as hell to me today.
Q
At a certain speed (109 in this particular car), the engine control module shuts off the fuel injectors so that theoretically the car cannot accelerate any more. Things don’t work in such a manner if you’re coasting down a steep hill in neutral though. More modern cars don’t cut off so abruptly and may be smart enough not to cut the injectors in neutral. There’s also a rev limiter that does the same thing when the engine hits a certain speed.
If only there were some way of stopping a car in an “emergency”. You really think someone would put a last chance stopping mechanism on a car. Not clustered with the rest of the commonly used controls, like Park, but somewhere isolated, held in reserve, requiring deliberate action to activate. An emergency system that can be activated accidentally is almost as worthless as not having any safety system at all.
The sort of safety system I imagine would be used only just before thinks go all tits up. Hey, I have an idea, we should call this emergency stopping system a US Cavalry Brake, they always come in just before the things get really bloody.
The thing about park being purely a mechanical system is that you can activate it even if your car is stalled with a dead battery. In some type of electrical system either electrical energy will be required to activate or deactivate the system. An electrical system failure while driving (they do happen) could make for some very interesting and very ugly results.
Perhaps your emergency brake could be one of these and 30 feet of stout chain.
When I was a teen a friend borrowed his dads car for the night and did about two dozen reverse curls on the local side streets. Wore the tire down to nothing but the car never stalled and the thing actually made it back to the house in one piece.
The proper way to do a reverse curl. Borrow your old man’s Buick with a 400 in it and an automatic trans. Come to a stop. Put car in reverse and punch it. Tire should be smoking. Once you move far enough to lay down about 30 feet of rubber you simply pull the shifter down into drive while keeping the gas mashed. You will then lay a similar patch right next to the first one with a curl where you shifted from reverse to drive. Reverse curl. Good times.
I’ve never done Drive-to-Park, but I have done Drive-to-Reverse in an automatic while driving about 35 mph. I think I was going for a blinker, but had a serious brain cramp.
It did no damage at all. Essentially, it was the same as putting the car in Neutral … the car just coasted along until I figured out what happened and I broke to a stop. Then I put it back in Drive and continued on my merry way.
Yeah … I can believe it :o
I had a senior moment recently when I slammed my car into Park while accelerating to freeway speeds on the on ramp.
I had always driven cars with stick shift and now I own a 2014 Dodge Journey Limited with automatic transmission.
So, I get the thing up to 50 on my way to 70 mph when I see a semi in the right lane of freeway so I feel the need to get on in front of him. I go to push down on non existent clutch and shift to accelerate.
I slam it into Park and the car just “grabs” and slows to about 30 while making some weird sound. I quickly realize "Holy Snit!"and throw in back into Drive.
There is no locking button to push on the shifter of this car and it went up into Park without forcing it. I continue on but I start to hear a clunking sound when I accelerate and turn left especially.
Hello, Ron s, and welcome to the SDMB. Have a look around, and we hope you stay. Just so you know, this particular thread is pretty old, so many of the people who posted in it may have drifted away (or met fiery ends on the freeway after their transmissions fell out).
It’s interesting how the brain sometimes defaults to the wrong response, isn’t it? You did the driving equivalent of saying “thank you” after someone else says “good morning.” Glad you lived to tell the tale.
I would guess the clunking sound is a bad CV joint. The sudden intense torque may have damaged it. Usually they’re not something that urgently need to be fixed, but eventually they will fall apart leaving you stranded.
That’ll teach you to drive an automatic. (Right now I have two cars with sticks and a two-wheeler and while it hasn’t happened yet, some day I’ll probably do something stupid while driving someone’s automatic car.)
This concern, while extremely unlikely to actually occur, can certainly happen to anybody.
There are two possibilities: (1) you MAY be able to use the parking brake. It doesn’t have a lot of power, so it’s not guaranteed to stop you before you burn out the brake. If nothing else, it should slow you down enough that you can then downshift and use engine braking to slow down even further. Off course, the utility of this course is limited by hills, weather, distance available, etc. (2) If worst comes to worst, you can scrape the car along a guard rail, fence posts, etc. Enough small impacts will bring you to a stop.
I have had to shift my old SUV (an Isuzu Rodeo) into park at moderate speed when the brakes started failing during a snowstorm no less. It made a terrible sound but it did stop and seemed to work fine after that. I had the same problem multiple times with the same results. I drove it that way for about a month because I didn’t have the time to fix it at the time. However, the last time I did it driving to work, I heard a brand new sound. Reverse didn’t work at all after that. I managed to drive it to a Toyota dealer, told them to take it as a $0 trade-in and bought a new vehicle.
Shifting into Park may work during an emergency and will probably even help you stop if you have to do it but it will cause damage and possibly even catastrophic transmission failure.
Didn’t work for me at all. I was 17 and driving a '78 T-bird. The brakes had been increasingly squishy (turns out the master cylinder had a huge crack), and one night the brakes pretty much failed completely. I was (fairly slowly) rolling down a hill to a T-junction and saw a car coming the other way. In a panic, I shifted into park, but the transmission just made a ratcheting sound and did nothing to slow the vehicle. Fortunately, I was able to swerve onto the shoulder and slow down. Probably shoulda hit the parking brake, but it was one of those annoying floor types.
We junked the car afterward since it wasn’t worth the cost of the master cylinder replacement, so I don’t know if it wrecked the transmission.
What did his old man say when he brought the car back with bald tires?
I was a bit surprised to be reading this thread and see my own post, until I looked at the date and realized that it was a zombie and the original was 9 years old. I agree with your second point, though - I sometimes yell at the TV when I see the common plot trope were the hero/victim is careening down the curvy mountain road after the villain has cut the brake lines, and they’re too stupid to do this. Screw the bodywork - save your life!
Yes, I had a catastrophic brake failure in my Toyota RAV4 a few weeks ago driving home from work. I noticed the brakes getting squishy for a few miles and then they were basically just gone. It could get a tiny bit of brake pressure if I stood up on the pedal and pushed as hard as I could but it was barely enough to hold it still at idle. The emergency brake didn’t work at all.
However, there is more than one way to stop a vehicle. I was going fairly fast on the interstate when it happened so I just used aerodynamic braking and the next minor hill to slow down as best I could and then just downshifted in sequence all the way down to low 4WD (automatic transmission). That will really slow you down. I still had 15 miles to go after that but I made it home and then to the repair shop the next morning. It isn’t the safest way to drive but it will work if you keep it slow and know what you are doing.
It turned out a rear brake caliper completely failed and destroyed pressure in the brake lines like someone cut them. That is why I get irritated when I hear about people getting into trouble because of runaway vehicles or brake problems. Do they not know anything about cars at all? Shift into neutral and then start downshifting and evaluate your options from there. Once you get into low gear, you won’t be going very fast. Who cares if you blow the engine at that point (and you probably won’t if you do it correctly)?
Well done for slowing down safely, but you then decided the best option was to drive for 15 miles without brakes? Even on the shoulder of the freeway, that seems… irresponsible is probably the best word for this forum (I can’t be bothered to make a Pit thread). What if a vehicle/animal/person suddenly appears in front of your car?