How to Reduce the Risk of a Car Rollaway
CR's testing of cars without rollaway protection prompted manufacturers to make their cars safer
Imagine getting out of your car only to find that you have forgotten to put it into Park, or that you had accidentally popped it into Neutral. Without a failsafe system to keep the car stationary when it's in the wrong gear—even due to simple human error—the car might roll away. The results can be tragic , sometimes leading to injury or death.
Shifters have changed over the past couple of decades, making it easier to slip up. For decades, automotive gear selectors (as they are also known) essentially came in two basic varieties: a column stalk or a center console shifter arranged in a familiar Park, Reverse, Neutral, Drive, and Low (PRNDL) pattern that could be operated without looking at the shifter. But automakers today use a variety of different shifter configurations, such as rotary dials and push buttons, to save space or create a brand-specific user experience. Most of them are electronic.
When Consumer Reports began subtracting points from the Overall Score of vehicles that lacked rollaway protection, it pushed the industry to do better. Now, all new vehicles with electronic shifters come with it—a big win for consumers. Some of these vehicles shift automatically into Park if the door is opened, and others apply the electronic parking brake. Either way, these systems prevent rollaway.
"If you're not in Park and you go to open the door to step out, the car should automatically put the transmission into Park or apply the parking brake; otherwise it will roll," says Kelly Funkhouser , CR's manager of vehicle technology. "If anyone is around the car, the result could be catastrophic."
CR began deducting points from the Overall Scores of dozens of new models that lacked rollaway protection in 2017, prompting a quick response from manufacturers to fix the problem on models that lacked it. "This is a problem that is easily solved, and CR informed manufacturers about our testing requirements," Funkhouser says. According to CR experts, most cars on the market had rollaway protection by 2018 or so.
Even so, our testing showed that several older models lacked this important safety feature. For example, the 2020 Toyota Prius and 2020 Jaguar and Land Rover models lacked rollaway protection, but the automakers added it the following year after CR reduced their Overall Scores.
Funkhouser says that rollaway protection is important even in cars without novel shifters because it can be particularly easy for someone to forget to put a car into Park in some common scenarios:
• Stepping out of the car to use a payment kiosk or bank terminal that's just out of reach.
• In vehicles equipped with a stop/start fuel-saving feature, in which the engine will not be running when the car is stopped but the car can still be in gear.
• Models that have an on/off button instead of a traditional key, because they can easily be left in the "on" position.
"If you own a car without rollaway protection, be careful, and never assume that the car isn't in gear, even if you can't hear the engine running," Funkhouser says. "Lack of a rollaway feature is more of a concern on hybrids and cars equipped with stop/start—cars that are quiet when they aren't moving. On most other cars, the sound of the engine running will usually let the driver know that it's in gear."
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