Scary motorway powerloss after accidental use of park button

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kentphev

Well-known member
Joined
Apr 22, 2015
Messages
78
Not sure if people are aware of this...

Recently we were driving along the M25 motorway doing about 60mph. My daughter had put her phone in the little storage space in front of the "gear lever" and without realising it managed to touch the park button that is immediately in front of the lever as she retrieved the phone.

In response the car starts to slow down with no visible or audible warnings! It then continues to slow down and we have cars and lorries flying past on both sides. Thankfully I got onto the hard shoulder before it came to a stop. Power steering, brakes etc all seemed to work still.

At the time we had no idea what the problem was and I figured perhaps the drive system had just died on me. Turned the car off and back on again and it came back to life and we continued on putting it down to a "glitch"

It wasn't until I took my daughter at again that the same thing happened. This time I connected the dots and figured out its the park button.

If this behaviour is by design.. seems a bit dangerous to me!! I tested it and just the lightest touch is enough, so an accidental activation is quite possible given the how close the button is to the central storage bin!

Watch out!
 
It shifts into neutral if you try to put it into Park or Reverse whilst moving forward. The same is true of many (real) automatic gearboxes.

True, it'd be nice if it just beeped a warning and stayed in Drive, but I guess some design team made a decision not to do that.
 
richr said:
It shifts into neutral if you try to put it into Park or Reverse whilst moving forward. The same is true of many (real) automatic gearboxes.

True, it'd be nice if it just beeped a warning and stayed in Drive, but I guess some design team made a decision not to do that.

Hadn't noticed whether it was in neutral or not - Was too busy trying to avoid being rammed off the road. Being in a middle lane of a busy road with sudden power loss is damn scary.

I cant see a legit reason the park button should be enabled at 60 mph! Downright dangerous if you ask me!
 
It is a fairly common occurrence, mostly after accidentally knocking the shift lever. The simple remedy is to pull the lever into D.
The normal way to put it into N is by pushing the lever to the right for two seconds.
 
kentphev said:
richr said:
It shifts into neutral if you try to put it into Park or Reverse whilst moving forward. The same is true of many (real) automatic gearboxes.

True, it'd be nice if it just beeped a warning and stayed in Drive, but I guess some design team made a decision not to do that.

Hadn't noticed whether it was in neutral or not - Was too busy trying to avoid being rammed off the road. Being in a middle lane of a busy road with sudden power loss is damn scary.

I cant see a legit reason the park button should be enabled at 60 mph! Downright dangerous if you ask me!

Well it's not really - as I understand, it Park puts a physical "pin"(?) into the transmission - so if it really did activate the car would either stop dead or destroy the gearbox. As the car doesn't know what you intend when selecting park or reverse it sensibly goes into neutral. The only problem is that you lose the forward power to the wheels that you get in B0 to overcome the drag effect of the motors - so Neutral acts like a brake (unlike an ICE car) with no regen. I sometimes use it to stop in traffic when I 've coasted up to stationary cars.
 
I don't think there is an actual "pin" in the PHEV transmission ... mainly due to the fact that there is no real "transmission". Others more knowledgeable than I can chime in, but I'm guessing it's an electronic brake on the wheels.

As to stopping behind someone in traffic, use the "hold" button (it's right behind the "parking brake" button). Works really well.

If hitting <Park> is really a problem ... you could put a cover on it. I seldom, if ever, use it. Just stop the car and turn off the ignition and it goes into park all by itself.
 
Given that the car can produce a rather alarming clonk in certain conditions when P is engaged I rather think it is a pin.
 
Have a look at the Mitsubishi technical documentation in the Technical section on here. The Park lock is most definitely an electrically powered mechanical device that physically locks the GKN transmission. However when pressing the switch in motion, it does not try to engage it, as the speed has to be zero before it will. So the same as selecting Reverse, it'll just go to Neutral.

I'd say a big percentage of Outlander PHEVs don't have a 'hold' button btw, due to having a mechanical handbrake with a proper handbrake lever. I wonder if we ought to make more of an effort to say what year/model we have as there are now three or four distinct variants of the car with different engines, batteries, electronics and so on.
 
The problem of the early models is that the switch will also engage when the speed is NEARLY zero - hence the clonk.
It will also engage reverse at slow speed, very practical when maneuvering.
 
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