“On Sunday, June 19 at 1:10 in the morning, a fatal traffic collision occurred. It was the result of the victim’s own car rolling backwards down his steep driveway, pinning him against a brick mailbox pillar and security fence. The victim was on his way to meet his friends for rehearsal. And when he didn’t show up, his friends went to his house, where they found him deceased by his car. It appeared he had momentarily exited his car leaving it in the driveway.”
There is a software fix recall coming that adds an auto park feature so this doesn’t happen again, but anyone who’s driven one of these vehicles knows how terrible of a design the shifter is.
^ It’s not that it’s complicated, it’s that for however many years we’ve been driving we’ve never had to hold a shift lever all the way forward when we wanted it to go in park. You shove it as far forward as it will go and immediately let go, and that’s park. I can definitely see how easy it would be to forget to hold the shifter forward long enough for it to select park instead of N or R when you were in a hurry and weren’t thinking about a muscle memory task you’ve doing a million times since you started driving.
I had a BMW rental one time that had a weird shifter like that. It took a couple times to learn, maybe not a great idea for a rental. If you own one, you would think you would learn how to use it properly.
I’m sure the owners learn how to use it just fine and don’t have any issues when they consciously think about just needing to hold the shifter forward for a couple seconds to select park. It’s when you go to put it in park without thinking about it and just subconsciously throw the shifter all the way forward and immediately let go because that’s how you did it since you started driving automatics that it’s a problem.
While I understand the shifter blows, how do you get killed by your own car? You’d have to be really f’in high or drunk to not notice your jeep rolling down a hill at you.
I can see it happening. My mother didn’t know she had a flat even though the digital dash display said she had low tire pressure and the tpms light was on.
I was seeing a chick that had one of these and I absolutely hated it. Along with the feature that would shut the engine off every time you stop. Nothing like waiting in traffic, on a hill, to make a left and you finally get a gap and you have to wait for the engine to start back up.
The family of late “Star Trek” actor Anton Yelchin has settled a wrongful death lawsuit with Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV over the rollaway crash of a Jeep Grand Cherokee that killed the up-and-coming actor almost two years ago.
Terms of the settlement, which was filed in Los Angeles Superior Court on Tuesday, were not disclosed.
At the time of Yelchin’s death, the roll away problem had been tied to at least 68 injuries, 266 crashes and 308 reports of property damage.
