It’s good that it has this feature, but a driver will have to have studied the manual in advance to know that:
- they’re supposed to put the car in P (not N) if it’s running away with itself, and
- to get it into P while rolling, they need to hold to button for a few seconds.
The average driver will not have reviewed the owner manual for how to disable a runaway car, so they won’t know that you have to hold the button for a few seconds - besides which, their first impulse when hauling ass down the highway (if they haven’t studied the manual" is not going to be “I should put it in park.”
Unconventional user interfaces for potentially dangerous machines operated by the great unwashed masses is guaranteed to cause disasters from time to time. FWIW, a bizarro PRNDL selector is what killed Anton Yelchin:
Fiat Chrysler Automobiles (FCA), the manufacturer of the Grand Cherokee, was aware of 2014 and 2015 models having a high rate of rollaway incidents due to a gearshift design that could make it difficult for the driver to determine whether the vehicle was in park or still in gear. FCA had already recalled all 2014–15 Grand Cherokees for this concern in April 2016, but the software patch to repair the vehicles did not reach dealers until the week of Yelchin’s death. Following his death, FCA accelerated the recall campaign and took steps to get the affected Jeeps repaired more quickly than originally planned.[53]