- Chrysler Pacifica owner mistook his minivan’s volume control for the rotary gear selector.
- He got out before he realized his mistake and had to watch the Pacifica roll into a neighbor’s car.
- The damage was minor and no one got hurt, but things could have been much worse.
Earlier this year, we asked you what new car or brand had the best automatic transmission shifter, and when the answers came in there was lots of love for the traditional-style, and increasingly rare, physical shifter that has to be moved front-to-back through various positions to select Park, Neutral, Drive or Reverse.
Perhaps surprisingly, among the comments we also noticed some love for rotary gear selectors – mostly thanks to their space efficiency – as fitted to modern Rams, the Ford Maverick and the Chrysler Pacifica. But one Pacifica owner who recently ‘fessed to a rotary-related balls-up probably isn’t so keen on circular shift dials now.
Related: Chrysler To Keep Pacifica Alive With A Major Facelift After 2025
The driver, posting as r/agod2486 on Reddit, told forum users how he was backing his 2020 minivan out of his driveway when he spied some trash in the interior and decided to briefly stop the van to get rid of the waste before carrying on reversing out onto the road.
But instead of gabbing a handful of rotary shifter and engaging Park before exiting towards the trashcan, the owner mistakenly grabbed the Chrysler’s also-dial-shaped volume control and turned that counter-clockwise.
“What I wanted to do: grab the trash, put the car in park, and go throw it away,” he wrote on the Reddit thread. “What I ended up doing: grab the trash, turn down the volume, and step out of the car to throw it away.”
This resulted in the Pacifica driving itself 10 ft (3.1 m) and into the back of a neighbor’s car with the Chrysler owner helplessly running alongside unable to do anything but wait for the inevitable impact.
Thankfully, the damage to both vehicles was minor, but as the poster points out, things could have been worse if the neighbor’s car hadn’t been there to stop the Pacifica making a much more ambitious break for freedom, particularly since his kids were in the back at the time.
But how did he make such a mess of things? The picture he included easily explains what went wrong. If The Chainsmokers had been playing when I got into the car I’d have been desperate to get out too, and my subconscious would have probably made me reach for the volume dial when grabbing the shifter would have made more practical sense.
It’s also possible that Chrysler’s can’t-be-killed minivan also has a terrible control layout. The Pacifica has four rotary dials mounted on the lower console surface, and although the shifter is closer to the driver and a little bigger than the other wheels, it’s only a couple of inches away from the volume dial. Though I’ve not driven a Pacifica, I imagine the shifter dial feels quite different in terms of resistance, but it’s not hard to imagine making this same mistake yourself if you were in a hurry, stressed, distracted – or all three.
One solution employed by other automakers that could have prevented this is for the car to automatically engage Park when the door is opened (though I find it annoying that you can’t reverse with the door open to check how close you are to a curb on cars that uses such a system).
So is this another reason why rotary shifters should be banished from the car world forever, a salutary lesson for Chrysler’s designers on grouping similar looking and feeling controls to close together, or just a case of a driver not paying enough attention? Drop your thoughts below.
