You are absolutely right! I think that's exactly what I did! I have been carefully watching myself today when I stopped and have been deliberately stopping a lot in safe places. I now believe that I either didn't press park sufficiently well and failed to engage it, or I didn't actually press it at all. I think I stopped the car on the brake pedal, held it for a while and then just opened the door to get out. The car carried on in drive, as I always use creep. I also use easy entry, which takes quite a while to move my seat back and my steering wheel up to allow the space to exit comfortably. This only works when I'm in park, and I don't remember that happening, which seems to confirm that I just took my foot off the brake as I opened the door. A lesson learned! I will certainly not be in such a hurry, or so distracted again! I'm usually very entranced by my lovely car and very carefully noticing what I'm doing because it's such a delight to drive, but taking care of a chattering five year old can sometimes be stressful and a huge distraction. I can assure you it won't happen again! And my sweet grandson will NEVER open a car door from the inside again. We both learned a lot yesterday.
Thank you for your reply. x
@Carolespirit: Thanks for coming back with an answer. I, for one, appreciate it.
So, at the moment, it appears that the car didn't have something, well, broken about it, which is a good thing.
But, I have a thought: As it happens, my S.O. is a human factors engineer. These are the kind of people, usually Industrial Engineers, but sometimes have majors in Psychology, who worry about man-machine interfaces and how to make them work well, preferably without danger to life and limb. As an example, one of their early claims to fame were forcing airplane manufacturers of all stripes to put the various cockpit controls in the same places, with the same directions to make something happen. (There were cases of of a pilot moving from one plane to another, something exciting would come up, and said pilot would make a move, without thinking (muscle memory) and auger the airplane into the ground.)
So, a HF engineer would ask, "OK, we had an accident. How can we change things so such an accident isn't possible?"
So, let's see what happened:
- Creep mode enabled.
- Missed hitting the Park button.
- Held down the brake a bit, then started to get out, thinking that the car wouldn't move.
- Car moved, accident. Um. Weight still on the seat?
OK. So, say we got access to all the sensors, all the time. What, if anything, could we do with the sensor outputs that would detect a case of 1-2-3, but would prevent 4?
For extra credit: Show that 1, 2, 3, as currently implemented, allows some behavior that we
do want, and that the proposed change either (a) doesn't change the behavior that we want or (b) there's a determination that that behavior that's wanted, isn't a behavior that'll be missed..
Let's see. Weight on the seat. Seat belt open/closed. Door open or closed. Speed of car? In-car camera view? Any others?