Hi Everyone,

I am an owner of a 2004 4Runner. I was driving down slope on the freeway the other day, and I switched to gear 3. When I tried to swtich back to the drive gear later, I accidentally push the gear into reverse. However, the SUV kept going foward as if it were in drive gear, and I immediately pull it back to drive gear.

I want to ask if any of you know if this will do any damage to the transimission. So far, the SUV feels the same as before, but I am just curious.

Thanks,

FourRunnerOwner33

 

No, you did not do any damage. More than likely the TQ convertor took the brunt of the slip-up. Not only that, but it is possible that your rig has a safety feature on it...I would imagine it does.

Let's put it this way: My sister and I were fighting in the car one day on the NJ Turnpike. My mom was driving my grandma's AMC Eagle, cruising about 75MPH. I pulled my sister's hair and she kicked the car into reverse, causing an awful grinding noise and white smoke to pour out from under the car. We came to stop on the side of the road. The car had shut off. After 5 minutes, the car started right up and we were on our way with one pissed off mommy!

 

Don't worry about it, I did the same thing about a year ago.
Right as I went to shift it into first gear I got hit with a dislexic notion and shifted the knob up instead of down :pat:
It made an awful clunking noise, then stalled out. I started it up again and it drove like normal.
One thing I did though was change my ATF fluid right away. Just to make sure there's no bits of metal or anything that might cause the tranny to burn up. There wasn't any metal in it though, and it's shifted as smooth as butter ever since.
It's scary though, I know

 

No worries, there are fail safe systems built into your ecu that'll prevent the reverse from kicking in.

Now ask that on an older vehicle, you'd prob feel alot of painful grinding sounds.

 

Isn't there protection against this? In my 3rd gen, I can't shift from neutral to reverse w/o pressing the button. Or was that the case and the button was pressed?
I know on one of my other cars (GM) you can shift like that, (maybe bump it into reverse while driving) but I thought that feature was something common on trucks.

 

It has been discussed in some other threads before. The ECU for the transmission will not allow the transmission to engage reverse gear when it is moving forward. Because of this control feature, there is no manual reverse lockout device in the shifter mechanism.

 

Thanks for all the answers from you guys; they really help! It is good to know that the ECU in my 4Runner has a fail safe system that prevents the transmission from engaging reverse gear while moving forward.

Thanks again,

FourRunnerOwner33