The right side stick in my last car controls wiper. Push it up will wipe the windshield once.

Ever since I bought the C300, I have been worried about what if my old habit kicks in. And it just happened.

Luckily, the car is moving slower than 10 miles a hour. The car stopped suddenly. I reacted immediately and stepped on break. Changing the gear to D and it went forward as if nothing has happened.

Certainly, I don't want to try what will happen if I don't step on the break. The gear shows R but I don't know if it will actually goes back.

Does anyone know what will happen? I'd think the car needs to be stopped first before going into reverse gear. But it does not appear to be the case.

 

In fact at very, very low speeds you can go directly from D to R. The purpose is so you can "rock" the vehicle as when you are stuck. In fact you can do the same thing in any car, however, the transmission will have to go trough neutral, thus you have to tap the stick up or down twice. If you try to jump into any drive mode including park at anything faster 5 mph the transmission will simply ignore the "command" and give you a message on the gauge display. The transmission is a lot smarter than you think. The only difference to other vehicles is that the stick doesn't have any physical "gates". Other electronic transmissions like Honda (Acura) are doing away with any type of lever and replacing it with buttons. I having pushed the park button a few times while driving, the only time it actually went into park the car was barely moving at a crawl.

 

oh and dont open your door while crawling along in D.......... scared the bejeezus out of me

 

That was how I went into park too nice big clunk!

 

Stuff like this worries me when I valet park. Who knows what those people do.

 

OK, that makes me feel a bit safer. I was hoping it has some kind of gates to put the car in neutral first

 

I believe you I just don't want to try it.

 

Next time look at the gear indicator screen - the number of arrows next to the gear is how many clicks of the shifter are necessary to move into the gear, and if there are no arrows it means the gear isn't available. When the car starts moving above a crawl, the arrow next to the P and R disappear, telling you it can't go into those gears no matter what you do. At a slow speed, you'll see a double arrow next to the R telling you that you have to tap up twice or push all the way up to go into R, and the arrow next to the P will show up as well.

 

Observed it today and the arrow at R does disappear once the car picks up speed.

The push though, is not symmetric. A small tap can move from D to N. Going back to D would need a harder push