Spectre
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FCA to recall 1.1 million vehicles due to Monostable e-shifter confusion, 41 injuries
- Thread starter rickhamilton620
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GRtak
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The Patriot is ninth on the list and the Compass is tweleth, how is that not strong?
Spectre
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Check the bolding. I was referring to the claim that the Journey was selling well.
Cellos88GT
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Goes to show how valuable the Jeep brand name is.
You should see the factory. The storage lot before they're loaded onto the rail cars is mostly filled with Patriots. Belvidere Assembly also makes the Dart and Compass. I'm slightly envious of this really nice bright ass red Patriot that's been sitting for a month in the far end of the lot. It's a color that's not normally offered and it looks swell.
Spectre
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Goes to show how much the huge incentives and cash on the hood they're giving buyers is worth, more like. Their plan was to have many of those be high volume sellers, far surpassing the niche-market Wrangler... yet the Wrangler is currently the best seller they have.
Which I still don't get. My dad has a '13. Wobbly suspension, and very weird steering. The feel is odd. That's the best I can say about it.
rickhamilton620
has a fetish for terrible cars
Journey: I stand corrected on sales numbers. Thanks Spectre for the chart.
It's got cachet - buying a car isn't always logical, it's highly emotional for a lot of people. Many likely buy it for the emotional factor not necessarily because it's good at doing "car things" (driving dynamics and refinement).
It's got cachet - buying a car isn't always logical, it's highly emotional for a lot of people. Many likely buy it for the emotional factor not necessarily because it's good at doing "car things" (driving dynamics and refinement).
Spectre
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That's because the Wrangler can do this, out of the box:
With the termination of the XTerra, it's the only vehicle on the market that can do that stock.
And, on the other end of the spectrum, it's still one of the cheapest convertibles you can buy and a significant segment of girls love them even if they don't go offroad. There's a reason the Barbie Jeep is a thing:
- - - Updated - - -
I'm sure that you're quite disappointed that the market is rejecting a vehicle you literally gushed over.
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JCE
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No thank you. FCA upgraded the software on my our Renegade that auto applies the electronic parking break every time the vehicle is put in to park. When the vehicle is in neutral it incessantly gives audible and visual bombardments that the vehicle is moving. Why is that last bit important? Try standing that nonsense when you take the car to an automatic car wash that pulls the vehicle through. It. Is. Fucking. Annoying. If I get out of my vehicle without safely ensuring it is safe to do so I deserve whatever happens. If I don't apply the parking break when necessary then I need more driver 101 training. If I open my door with the vehicle in gear then I am the idiot not the vehicle or automaker. If I get out of the vehicle in the aforementioned scenario then I am a BIG IDIOT. Because, common sense.
I like old-school things and I am pretty against change as a whole when a product is perfectly viable but this electronic shifter issue is a NON issue for me personally. Now if I had my way I'd love a column shift like the Police Pursuit Chargers get to free up some room in the console--but hello pipe dream. LOL
Well only if you are in a hurry. If you go at it like a reasonable human being there is a sensory and tactile response clicking through each gear. You'll only have a hard time going from D to P or R to P if you rush it like a maniac. LOL
Check your PM, you're welcome anytime to test it out for yourself on my Charger.
I agree. Almost any car can roll over, especially anything under the SUV classification.
The Wrangler is a beast off-road no matter what the blokes across the pond say.
Spectre
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Since I was having trouble finding an unpatched car to test this on at a dealer (every FCA dealer I contacted said they'd already patched every single one on their lots - even places like Carmax had already patched theirs or refused to let anyone test an unpatched car), I took JCE up on his offer and tested his unpatched Charger in a parking lot this evening. (Thanks again!) We confirmed a few things and discovered a couple things about the unpatched car that were rather disturbing - at least to me.
1. The classic 'habitual' shift from Drive to Park still works, but with a potentially dangerous twist. This is typically performed by grabbing the gear handle then in one single motion depressing the lockout button while pushing the selector lever all the way forward. (As an aside, whatever idiot decided to put the lockout button on top of the T-handle instead of on the end needs to be beaten with a club studded with nails.) This *does* work on the unpatched car, but it seems you must hold it there for at least one second before the indicator lights on the shifter mechanism and the dashboard display will register that you selected Park. If you do not hold it until the change registers, the car may decide you selected reverse instead as it did once while I was testing, which brings us to the next point.
2. If you are sliding it from Drive to Park, you must do so rapidly and with authority, but you *must* also firmly hit the travel stop at the end and hold it there. If you use the average person's vague push, it may not go all the way forward and will end up in Neutral or Reverse, which was repeatable. That's bad enough, but it's complicated and made even worse by the fact...
3. ...that there is absolutely no immediate attention-getting indication that you've fucked up. The FCA Monostable shifter lights are all white and on the small side so at first glance you may not notice it's in R instead of P. The gearshift lever will always be in the same position once you've released it and on the in-dash display a very thin white circle surrounds the current selected gear position in the (small, vertical) list - it doesn't change colors, so again at a quick glance you can easily miss it.
For those that aren't familiar with automatics gearshifter conventions over here, here's a couple selected conventional gearshifts from common US cars.
This is from an 08 Honda Accord - the position letters light up in the colors printed.
Here's the one out of the 09 Ford Expedition - an LED lights up next to the (backlit) gear position. I believe it's amber in park and neutral and green in the rest, but I'd need to go check.
It gets worse. There's no other aural or visual warning at all. If you disengage your seatbelt and open the door, the car doesn't do anything like set off a buzzer, beep, bong, no warning light, no attention getting alert on the monitor, nothing. This is in *any* gear selection, so that means it doesn't have an effective version of the Federally-mandated 'key is in the ignition and the door is open' audio alert. I can very easily see the stereotypical not terribly bright housewife or bumbling door to door salesman thinking they put it in Park, glancing at the indicator and getting out to collect the mail from the box at the end of their drive only to have the car roll.
4. Complicating the matter even further was the fact that if you put the car in Reverse, the car doesn't move backward under idle torque quite like most older cars do. In fact, for the first couple seconds it barely moves so the usual last sign that you screwed up isn't there - the ground going by at a decent clip so the sensation of you putting your foot on the ground would be markedly different, accompanied by the skidding noises as your shoe slid across the pavement. I didn't test this myself as it would be poor manners not to mention dumb (and I didn't want to alarm JCE or his wife), but it was obvious that someone could put the car into what they thought was park then get out to check the mail at the mailbox without any obvious sign that something had gone wrong until the door hit them.
For those that don't understand why this is a big thing, you need to know how mail is delivered in most parts of the US. If you don't live in an apartment or condo (and sometimes even if you do), you will often have your own mailbox by the curb at the end of your driveway. This is the case in both poor and affluent neighborhoods.
The letter carrier will drive up the road, hopefully delivering your mail to your box without getting out of their vehicle. The custom for people who have this arrangement (which is much of America) is to pull into your driveway, stop the car, get out with the car still running in Park, check to see if there's anything in the box, then get back in the car and drive to where you're going to park it, be it further up the drive or in a garage or whatever. In this scenario, it's very easy to see how the FCA Monostable shifter could be dangerous or even lethal; you get out to check the mail, start to step away and your car door clotheslines you from behind.
So, yeah, this is a real thing and it's a real fuckup on the part of FCA in implementing this. It's especially revealing that literally everyone else with this technology chose to implement warnings and lockouts as they found this would be an obvious issue but FCA didn't.
Other thoughts:
The detents between some of the gear positions aren't very good and they lead to some surprising results. Getting from Park to Reverse is especially noteworthy. A 'normal' pull back to Reverse will just get you Neutral; you really have to be gentle and look at the shifter or dashboard position displays. Surprisingly, this isn't the same case going from Neutral to Reverse. I wouldn't want to be faced with a panic situation where I need to reverse quickly from a parking spot1 to avoid an accident with this thing.
It is *way* too easy to tap the shifter slightly and have the thing trip over from Drive to Neutral. The detents (again) between the two positions are weak and per Federal law, you don't have to push the lockout button to get into Neutral from Drive (which is fine) - however, going back requires more pressure and you must press the lockout button. Don't tap your shift lever in time to your music if you drive with this iteration of the Monostable, I think.
As you might have gathered from the above, the effort needed to get between detent positions is not consistent at all with this thing. The tactile quality of the shift changes as well.
Yes, you can carefully advance the gear lever one position at a time - but it's not that easy to do based on tactile feedback alone. You really do need to look at the gear position indicator(s), until (perhaps) you really, really get used to the weird variable feedback you're getting. I'm not sure that the majority of the population can really learn to operate this by rote; I'm going to start looking around in parking lots to see how many people with FCA Monostable equipped cars are looking down into the cockpit when parking their cars.
Could someone safely operate the FCA variant of the Monostable? Certainly - obviously many people can and do. But to do so safely and consistently over the long term (IMHO) really requires an inordinate amount of attention be devoted to checking and double checking what happened when you are shifting gears, and that's the downfall. Essentially, this is above and beyond the level of attention you need to be paying to physically operate a manual transmission motorcycle and that's not really acceptable for an application like 'family automatic sedan' or 'Mom's family truckster' especially when the operator is under stress. There's reasons why every modern military tries to make as many vehicle functions as possible be operable by rote, with consistent feedback (tactile, aural or visual) so you know the effect without looking at the controls - so the operator can continue to safely drive the vehicle while under stress. This implementation of the Monostable just doesn't pay any attention to that.
Mind, I?m not at all against the idea of a gear selector that moves back to the center and stays there when not in use - a pseudo-sequential shifter or even an actual sequential shifter in a vehicle is not inherently a bad idea to me. My daily driver has a six speed sequentially shifted transmission, after all. My biggest fundamental issue with operating the FCA variant of the Monostable is that the pseudo-sequential nature of the control is badly inconsistent and as a result it is far harder to use than it should be. A sequential or pseudo sequential gear selector should have consistent shift effort and feel between each position as much as possible to enable use by rote or by feel and this version just doesn?t. The feel and effort varies, and that?s bad.
1. The classic 'habitual' shift from Drive to Park still works, but with a potentially dangerous twist. This is typically performed by grabbing the gear handle then in one single motion depressing the lockout button while pushing the selector lever all the way forward. (As an aside, whatever idiot decided to put the lockout button on top of the T-handle instead of on the end needs to be beaten with a club studded with nails.) This *does* work on the unpatched car, but it seems you must hold it there for at least one second before the indicator lights on the shifter mechanism and the dashboard display will register that you selected Park. If you do not hold it until the change registers, the car may decide you selected reverse instead as it did once while I was testing, which brings us to the next point.
2. If you are sliding it from Drive to Park, you must do so rapidly and with authority, but you *must* also firmly hit the travel stop at the end and hold it there. If you use the average person's vague push, it may not go all the way forward and will end up in Neutral or Reverse, which was repeatable. That's bad enough, but it's complicated and made even worse by the fact...
3. ...that there is absolutely no immediate attention-getting indication that you've fucked up. The FCA Monostable shifter lights are all white and on the small side so at first glance you may not notice it's in R instead of P. The gearshift lever will always be in the same position once you've released it and on the in-dash display a very thin white circle surrounds the current selected gear position in the (small, vertical) list - it doesn't change colors, so again at a quick glance you can easily miss it.
For those that aren't familiar with automatics gearshifter conventions over here, here's a couple selected conventional gearshifts from common US cars.
This is from an 08 Honda Accord - the position letters light up in the colors printed.
Here's the one out of the 09 Ford Expedition - an LED lights up next to the (backlit) gear position. I believe it's amber in park and neutral and green in the rest, but I'd need to go check.
It gets worse. There's no other aural or visual warning at all. If you disengage your seatbelt and open the door, the car doesn't do anything like set off a buzzer, beep, bong, no warning light, no attention getting alert on the monitor, nothing. This is in *any* gear selection, so that means it doesn't have an effective version of the Federally-mandated 'key is in the ignition and the door is open' audio alert. I can very easily see the stereotypical not terribly bright housewife or bumbling door to door salesman thinking they put it in Park, glancing at the indicator and getting out to collect the mail from the box at the end of their drive only to have the car roll.
4. Complicating the matter even further was the fact that if you put the car in Reverse, the car doesn't move backward under idle torque quite like most older cars do. In fact, for the first couple seconds it barely moves so the usual last sign that you screwed up isn't there - the ground going by at a decent clip so the sensation of you putting your foot on the ground would be markedly different, accompanied by the skidding noises as your shoe slid across the pavement. I didn't test this myself as it would be poor manners not to mention dumb (and I didn't want to alarm JCE or his wife), but it was obvious that someone could put the car into what they thought was park then get out to check the mail at the mailbox without any obvious sign that something had gone wrong until the door hit them.
For those that don't understand why this is a big thing, you need to know how mail is delivered in most parts of the US. If you don't live in an apartment or condo (and sometimes even if you do), you will often have your own mailbox by the curb at the end of your driveway. This is the case in both poor and affluent neighborhoods.
The letter carrier will drive up the road, hopefully delivering your mail to your box without getting out of their vehicle. The custom for people who have this arrangement (which is much of America) is to pull into your driveway, stop the car, get out with the car still running in Park, check to see if there's anything in the box, then get back in the car and drive to where you're going to park it, be it further up the drive or in a garage or whatever. In this scenario, it's very easy to see how the FCA Monostable shifter could be dangerous or even lethal; you get out to check the mail, start to step away and your car door clotheslines you from behind.
So, yeah, this is a real thing and it's a real fuckup on the part of FCA in implementing this. It's especially revealing that literally everyone else with this technology chose to implement warnings and lockouts as they found this would be an obvious issue but FCA didn't.
Other thoughts:
The detents between some of the gear positions aren't very good and they lead to some surprising results. Getting from Park to Reverse is especially noteworthy. A 'normal' pull back to Reverse will just get you Neutral; you really have to be gentle and look at the shifter or dashboard position displays. Surprisingly, this isn't the same case going from Neutral to Reverse. I wouldn't want to be faced with a panic situation where I need to reverse quickly from a parking spot1 to avoid an accident with this thing.
It is *way* too easy to tap the shifter slightly and have the thing trip over from Drive to Neutral. The detents (again) between the two positions are weak and per Federal law, you don't have to push the lockout button to get into Neutral from Drive (which is fine) - however, going back requires more pressure and you must press the lockout button. Don't tap your shift lever in time to your music if you drive with this iteration of the Monostable, I think.
As you might have gathered from the above, the effort needed to get between detent positions is not consistent at all with this thing. The tactile quality of the shift changes as well.
Yes, you can carefully advance the gear lever one position at a time - but it's not that easy to do based on tactile feedback alone. You really do need to look at the gear position indicator(s), until (perhaps) you really, really get used to the weird variable feedback you're getting. I'm not sure that the majority of the population can really learn to operate this by rote; I'm going to start looking around in parking lots to see how many people with FCA Monostable equipped cars are looking down into the cockpit when parking their cars.
Could someone safely operate the FCA variant of the Monostable? Certainly - obviously many people can and do. But to do so safely and consistently over the long term (IMHO) really requires an inordinate amount of attention be devoted to checking and double checking what happened when you are shifting gears, and that's the downfall. Essentially, this is above and beyond the level of attention you need to be paying to physically operate a manual transmission motorcycle and that's not really acceptable for an application like 'family automatic sedan' or 'Mom's family truckster' especially when the operator is under stress. There's reasons why every modern military tries to make as many vehicle functions as possible be operable by rote, with consistent feedback (tactile, aural or visual) so you know the effect without looking at the controls - so the operator can continue to safely drive the vehicle while under stress. This implementation of the Monostable just doesn't pay any attention to that.
Mind, I?m not at all against the idea of a gear selector that moves back to the center and stays there when not in use - a pseudo-sequential shifter or even an actual sequential shifter in a vehicle is not inherently a bad idea to me. My daily driver has a six speed sequentially shifted transmission, after all. My biggest fundamental issue with operating the FCA variant of the Monostable is that the pseudo-sequential nature of the control is badly inconsistent and as a result it is far harder to use than it should be. A sequential or pseudo sequential gear selector should have consistent shift effort and feel between each position as much as possible to enable use by rote or by feel and this version just doesn?t. The feel and effort varies, and that?s bad.
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rickhamilton620
has a fetish for terrible cars
I quickly perused the 2014 Charger manual (scraped from a 3rd party site/Google result, not direct from FCA in case they updated their copy):
It seems like they designed the safeguards for not placing the car in park around people always turning the car off via the Keyless Go button, not taking into account the "get out while car is running" scenario.
Unless they didn't go over it, the EVIC indeed won't display the "Not In Park!" message until the Keyless Go button is pressed....then it shifts to P anyway.
Not the brightest move in the world (the lack of accounting for other scenarios, not the auto shift to P )
Edit: I re-read - it does NOT shift to P upon pushing the Keyless Go button...it just keeps the engine on and displays the message in the EVIC while the car remains in gear....
It seems like they designed the safeguards for not placing the car in park around people always turning the car off via the Keyless Go button, not taking into account the "get out while car is running" scenario.
Unless they didn't go over it, the EVIC indeed won't display the "Not In Park!" message until the Keyless Go button is pressed....then it shifts to P anyway.
Not the brightest move in the world (the lack of accounting for other scenarios, not the auto shift to P )
Edit: I re-read - it does NOT shift to P upon pushing the Keyless Go button...it just keeps the engine on and displays the message in the EVIC while the car remains in gear....
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Spectre
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Most of that seems to be boilerplate or at least related to what they've been printing in manuals for the last twenty-some years. Also, it seems to be quite incorrect compared to the reality - there is no requirement to move the lever to the left to get it into Park on JCE's 8 speed box. In fact, you can't move it left or right in Park IIRC. And of course, if you let go of the shifter, it does physically move back out of the park position. The only thing I can think of is that maybe this manual is for the cop car versions with the column shifter? Though that doesn't account for the 'forward' part of the instructions...
- - - Updated - - -
It's especially damning that everyone else seems to have thought of the 'exit while running' problem *but* FCA.
One question that should be asked, though - Audi and BMW seem to have thought of this issue and added the safety code and interlocks in. FCA didn't with the results we've seen. So why didn't ZF include this functionality in the original code pack? Or did they and FCA just didn't implement it?
Edit:
I didn't test this with JCE's car, but it doesn't surprise me. That's another not-great decision they made there.
- - - Updated - - -
It's especially damning that everyone else seems to have thought of the 'exit while running' problem *but* FCA.
One question that should be asked, though - Audi and BMW seem to have thought of this issue and added the safety code and interlocks in. FCA didn't with the results we've seen. So why didn't ZF include this functionality in the original code pack? Or did they and FCA just didn't implement it?
Edit:
I didn't test this with JCE's car, but it doesn't surprise me. That's another not-great decision they made there.
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rickhamilton620
has a fetish for terrible cars
It definitely covered the Monostable shifter. It made no reference to the column shifter.
I suspect the park verification instructions were borrowed from the section after the 8 speed shifter discussion - they also cover shifting the 5 speed Mercedes trans with the gated shifter. In that case shifting to park is a forward and to the left movement and the same instructions for verifying park are given again.
Spectre
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Edits in immediately prior response above, please check.
And yeah, that's going to burn them in court because the actual manual instructions were incorrect for the as-shipped product. Pretty stupid.
Crazyjeeper
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Time to bring back the column shifter!
Spectre
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Mercedes is moving back that way, but their idea is basically 'stick a Monostable shifter on the steering column.' On the other hand, it does have a separate and distinctive motion for Park that's not going to result in the same disaster as FCA's created.
JimCorrigan
Well-Known Member
That's (essentially) the shifter on my wife's GLK.Mercedes is moving back that way, but their idea is basically 'stick a Monostable shifter on the steering column.' On the other hand, it does have a separate and distinctive motion for Park that's not going to result in the same disaster as FCA's created.
CrzRsn
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So what I find interesting is that Audi has literally the same shifter on theirs cars equipped with the ZF 8 speed, yet they managed to integrate it properly.
Chrysler 300:
Audi A8:
I don't know. Having driven an unpatched 300, I had had no issues whatsoever getting the car into park, or knowing what gear I was in. And this was before I was paying extra attention to any of this. But again, as I've said before, the fix is entirely software based. They need to add some code that will automatically put the vehicle into park if the door is opened and the driver's seatbelt is unbucked. If the seatbelt is unbuckled after the door is open, play a chime and display a message in the cluster.
Chrysler 300:
Audi A8:
I don't know. Having driven an unpatched 300, I had had no issues whatsoever getting the car into park, or knowing what gear I was in. And this was before I was paying extra attention to any of this. But again, as I've said before, the fix is entirely software based. They need to add some code that will automatically put the vehicle into park if the door is opened and the driver's seatbelt is unbucked. If the seatbelt is unbuckled after the door is open, play a chime and display a message in the cluster.
rickhamilton620
has a fetish for terrible cars
So what I find interesting is that Audi has literally the same shifter on theirs cars equipped with the ZF 8 speed, yet they managed to integrate it properly.
Chrysler 300:
Audi A8:
I don't know. Having driven an unpatched 300, I had had no issues whatsoever getting the car into park, or knowing what gear I was in. And this was before I was paying extra attention to any of this. But again, as I've said before, the fix is entirely software based. They need to add some code that will automatically put the vehicle into park if the door is opened and the driver's seatbelt is unbucked. If the seatbelt is unbuckled after the door is open, play a chime and display a message in the cluster.
I can't believe they didn't have access to a Audi product to at least try it out first.
They now have a new video about the Auto Park feature being installed as part of the recall process, as well as reviewing the official parking procedure:
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