Not to be anticlimactic, but the answer is ‘nothing happens’ when you select reverse in a recent, automatic Ford Fusion, which is sold as the Mondeo in Europe and other regions.
As you can imagine, it’s not the answer that has us rolling our eyes, but the question itself. Asking what would happen if you put your car in reverse at 70mph (113km/h) is about as – putting in mildly here – ill-advised and dangerous as pondering what would happen if you stick one of your body parts in a power outlet.
But okay, we can understand being curious and experimenting. What we can’t comprehend is the logic behind testing it out on a public road and at such high-speeds instead of a closed track or even a parking lot at low speeds. That’s beyond idiotic…
Yet someone did it for internet fame and such, with the blokes at AutoVlog having amassed some nearly 2 million views in just five days. Congrats. For the record, they’re the same guys who did a similar video a few weeks back asking what happens if you throw out your smart key’s on the move.
Just because nothing happened on this specific car and transmission does not mean you won’t ruin your gearbox and risk getting into a nasty, uncontrolled crash in another vehicle and transmission – something bad is almost guaranteed to happen with most manuals or older, dumb automatics without failsafe features. So please don’t try this at home. We can’t stress that enough.