While in a driveway, I was reversing in my Prius but accidently put it in neutral to have the car go into neutral and lurch forward hitting a parked car in the driveway. Though I tried to brake as much as I could it still went forward at 5-10 miles and hour. Has this happened before?
Doesn't make sense. Neutral disengages the drive, so the car can't lurch. To put the car in Neutral, you have to hold the shift lever to the left for a second or two before it disengages the drive. If you simply push the lever left and release it, the car will still be in gear. If you had been in D (forward gear) and wanted to move to R (left and up), but only went left briefly without holding it there to disengage, then the car would still be in D (forward) and the car could lurch forward. Suggest you practice with the shift lever to learn the behavior.
Yep, gotta hold the shift lever in the left position for at least 3-5 seconds before Neutral is engaged. I parallel park on a hill and have to curb my tires. It took some getting used to, and my previous car was a Prius C. Left Up or Down, pretty much engages immediately.
If I were investigating an incident such as this, I’d check for stored Vehicle Control History events, which could help to identify abnormal shifting operations, such as “Shift N Change by Busy Shift.” It’s the driver’s responsibility, however, to do as Toyota recommends in the Owner’s Manual (PDF), page 250: “make sure that the shift position has been changed to the desired position by checking the shift position indicator.” For R⃣, you can also listen for the reverse beep and watch for video from the camera to appear.
there is also a warning message on the MID screen after a missed shift into neutral. It's frustrating to try to comply with the message as the shifter doesn't respond immediately while holding the shifter in the neutral position, it takes a few seconds for the computer to respond as @BiomedO1 explained above. It's confusing, especially the first few times it happens.
I remember seeing somewhere that this has caused accidents… that once the car is in neutral, you don’t have to press on the brakes to shift back into drive. So if some one was reversing, and then somehow put the car in neutral by mistake or just fiddling on the shifter knob, but still believing that it was in reverse and gave it gas, but it could have been easily put in drive if not familiar with the shifter arrangement, could have been put into drive and then the car would lurch forward. I guess may be that’s the reason for the rather loud back up beeping we have in these cars…
