I was unloading a big box out of the passenger seat in my S2000. A slight shift was enough for the box to press down on the e-brake button, and drop the brake. My hands are around the box still stuck in the cabin on the passenger side, with my feet on the ground. The car is now rolling down the drive way and picking up speed. I tried to pull a Fred Flinstone and use my feet to slow the car, but it's wet and my shoes have worse traction than S02 in the rain. I already see the soon-to-be-doomed Civic parked across the street getting closer quickly. I even tried giving the Civic a last-second kick to slow the impact but that didn't help much as our rear bumpers hit. Now the civic has about $800 in damage and my bumper is all scraped up too.

Lesson learned: NEVER place any load on the e-brake because it will depress the e-brake button and release the brake (or pull the e-brake with load on top of it). Also always keep your car in gear, which would have prevented this mess as well. I hope this did not happen in vain and this post would find it self useful to other S2k owners.

 

A few of us preach about this as simple, good driving habit (well, parking, in this case) and in those threads where we do post this advice, there are always a few who come out of wherever they're hiding to flame us. I hope your thread here will go to show that those flamers are dumber than a sack o' hammers.
Thanks for putting this up, even though it was at your expense. May you get these repairs handled in expeditious fashion. And I'm glad you didn't slip under the car while it was rolling. Had that happened, you might just not have been here to post about it.

 

koshiro,

I'm very sorry to read about your incident. Luckily noone was hurt . Unfortunately sometimes these things just happen. But it sounds like everything can be fixed easily enough.

This very thing makes me nervous with both my cars (both manual), as I have a somewhat steep driveway (plus all the stories I've heard about S2000 E-brakes). I personally was taught to park the car in gear, and I'm now in the almost OC habit of checking each time I park in my driveway to make sure 1) it's in gear and 2) the parking brake is up.

Best of luck.




P.S. Not sure if this could've helped in this situation, but when parking against a curb (such as parallel parked) many people forget the turning that wheel appropriately can help a car from rolling too far. For instance, parking on the right hand side of the road, turn the wheel to the right when parking facing downhill and turn the wheel to the left when parking facing uphill. Unfortunately, this doesn't help when parking in my driveway.

 

Leaving the car in gear is something that I forced myself to learn over the past year.

It has helped me gain a lot more piece of mind when I leave my car or working around inside the cabin.

Good thing you were not hurt...

Bumpers can be fixed.

Tim

 

o damn

sorry i had to grin because I was visualizing the entire situation in my head.

Lesson learned, hope it doesnt happen again

 

ok this is a habit i think i'm going to pick up, even living in flat ol chicago.

 

http://videos.streetfire.net/search/police...0E639576A13.htm

 

This is why you should always park your car in gear.

 

I've always parked all my manual cars [and sportbikes for that matter] in gear since I was 16. I rarely use the e-brake out of caution as well. If you are hard on the rear brakes and put it on before the rear rotors cool down, it can assist in warping them.

NOTE-putting the car gear does NOT garauntee the car won't roll backwards if the slope is steep enough. During a sales job in Indiana, I had my 5spd accord parked on a customers very steep driveway. As I was chatting with him, I saw the car shifting about 2 ft back every 10-15 seconds. I quickly ran out there, parked the car across the incline, and set the e-brake.

Mechanically, I've always been curious about this situation. What exactly happens as the car is in 1st gear and the car goes backwards in spurts? I'm guessing it is the flywheel or something disconnecting and connecting again.

 

its habit for me to toss it in gear when I park. car stops, brake down, clutch in, in to 2nd (dunno thats habit, I imagine 1st or reverse would be better), ignition off, e-brake on, door open, e-brake check since S2K's ebrake stinks, out the door..

you should have tossed the box and dove into the door to grab the ebrake. Personal wellbeing comes after vehicle health

when I spun my S4 into a wall, after I failed to correct, all I could think was "shit my car's gonna get F'd up".. not "crap I'm gonna hit a wall going way too fast on a bridge with a 200ft drop into a river with jagged rocks, this is gonna hurt"