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The latest entry in a fast-growing series of recent stories about people ruining cars with manual transmissions comes from Reddit’s u/Kanagawabatice, who posted a short video of a Mustang in a garage with the following caption: “when you let your 7 year old start the car and he forgets to take it out of gear.”
The video, as promised, shows the back of a red, fifth-gen Ford Mustang that’s in a garage. The car can be heard starting before lurching forward and hitting the back wall of the garage, since the gearbox wasn’t into neutral.
As commenter u/Logosfidelis points out (correctly in my view), the title of this video should perhaps be “when you forget to take your car out of gear before you let your 7-year-old start it.” Indeed, the seven-year-old, who is not yet halfway to being old enough to possess a license, cannot be blamed for not yet fully understanding how to operate a car.
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Weirdly, this isn’t the first time this has happened. In 2020, a nearly identical accident was recorded albeit with a more valuable Ford Mustang Shelby GT350.
Since this is becoming a trend, that can, unfortunately, have tragic consequences (sorry to bring down the mood), maybe we should take a moment to reiterate how to prevent this from happening.
When you start a car with a manual transmission, you have to push the clutch pedal to the floor, ensure that the transmission is in neutral (by moving the gear lever to the middle position in which it can wiggle freely from side to side), and then turn the key (or press the start button), otherwise the car will lurch forward (or backward, if you’ve got reverse engaged), just like it did in this case. If you aren’t planning on moving immediately, it’s probably best to pull the handbrake at this point to prevent the car from rolling away.