Agree with you, this requires tried and true parenting, not physically altering the car. I squirm at the notion from the earlier poster that hitting a child is necessary. Our 9-year old kid got into his fair share of trouble, but we have never had to hit him ever in his life. He learns through communication and respect. Show your kids respect, they will listen to you.
My child is considerably older but rehearsing steps with a car as complicated as the X is important. When we first got it, he thought he can open the door the minute the car stops. He learned quick that he needs to wait until I put the car in park before operating the button and making sure there is clearance outside. Even paying attention not to open the door when the garage door is actively opening or closing. The best solution for a 4 year old is to have strict rules to never touch that button, ever.
I agree.
And while this is completely off topic, I feel like there's something important to be said about hitting a child other than just how bad it is.
Establishing true communication with a 4 year-old or even older child can be tremendously time-consuming and difficult, because it requires the child to trust and like the person in the first place. And on top of that, children tend to think less ahead of any action and its consequences, which means even if effective communication and understanding has taken place, it may still take a bunch of repetition and/or big enough consequences before the child can effectively control their own short-sighted and impulsive actions.
And because it takes so much time and energy to get a child to understand and voluntarily stop themselves from certain behaviors, many parents who don't have the time or energy, perhaps overwhelmed and tired from their jobs or other difficult things going on in their own life, often resort to the quick and lazy but powerful communication method of hitting the child, which can be quite effective but also detrimental to the child and the relationship.
The important part here I feel is that while the physical pain and fear of getting hit can be detrimental to a child by itself, the worst part of hitting a child, by many orders of magnitude, is actually that, over repeated exposure and compounded by other observations and experiences, the child can oftentimes intuitively sense that he/she doesn't rank very high in the parent's priorities in life. And it becomes a festering source of emotional pain that the child cannot fully understand or articulate until much later in life, if ever.
I believe this is the reason why some parents manage to have great relationships with their well-adjusted children despite having spanked them as much as they deemed necessary, while many other parents manage to derail their children's emotional development and ruin their relationship with the child apparently by having spanked them.
This is why we sometimes have perfectly decent and well adjusted adults today that believe spanking is not a bad thing despite the statistics and scientific research pointing to the fact that a child spanked is more likely to have issues into adulthood. It makes sense that a larger portion of parents engaging in physical punishment would be those who, for one reason or another, tend to expend less time/effort/care for their children, given the fact that physical punishment is the most efficient and direct form of inducing a large amount of fear and aversion in a child.
Some children who grow up with rich parents who provide every material and monetary support for the child still end up as unproductive members of society who despise their parents, while some children who grow up in abject poverty with a bed-ridden father and a minimum-wage working mother magically become tiny mature adults at a young age who love their parents and go on to lead successful and satisfying lives. The key ingredient here making the difference doesn't seem to be money spent or how the child was punished by the parent, but the child's innate perception of how far the parents were willing to go in order to care for them.
My suspicion is that engaging in physical punishment wouldn't be so detrimental if it wasn't a symptom of the parent not willing to expend enough time/effort/care for the child. Of course, it would be a much better and a higher level parenting to be able to achieve communication without having to resort to spanking. I just feel that people are missing the real reason of why spanking can be so bad for a child, which is that it can often be a direct way of telling the subconscious of the child that "I actually care more about doing whatever it takes to make you listen to me and/or relieving my frustration than I care about you."