What Would Happen If You Drive While

What happens if you put your car in park when you are driving?

It sure would make a lot of noise as the parking pawl ground away at the gear! Quickly destroying the gear/pawl used for Park, the vehicle would coast on until you selected a different drive gear. Then , a trip to a service facility to repair and clean your transmission would be in order. Actually, the resulting noise would make you immediately stop your action. The transmission would NOT be able to actually engage the Parking mechanism at (nearly any) speed.

What would happen if you took the hard drive out of a PC that was turned on?

Well, as long as the cables are intact, you’re just dandy. The powered drive will still be spinning, and it’ll feel like a gyroscope in your hand, the spin resisting your handling of it. Pretty cool, but not recommended for prolonged experiments if there’s something important on that drive.If you suddenly disconnect the data or power cable, and that’s your system drive, the PC crashes pretty fast. Not necessarily instantly. The operating system keeps lots of data in memory, both reading and writing, and file system drivers are tolerant of drive errors to an extent — so after the drive is done, the system will still be trying to hit that drive. Within a minute or so, expect a full system crash.The danger of this is primarily that any data being written to the drive could be corrupted. Not the best plan, though if you’re using a modern file system with journaling, you may lose a little data, but you probably won’t corrupt the drive itself. Probably.If it’s a secondary drive and you’re not using it, your PC will probably protest quite a bit about a drive being removed without you dismounting/ejecting it. But it may not cause any problem.In some cases, the drive is intended to be removed while powered. The SATA power and data connectors are designed to be safe for plug/unplug under power. So are USB, Firewire, Thunderbolt, and eSATA. So electrically, you’re pretty safe these days pulling a drive out. I have a couple of PCs around here with SATA drive bays that in fact encourage their removal under power… as long as they’re unmounted, of course. Same with USB… I have a RAID on USB 3, and as long as I “eject” it before unplugging, no problems.Some operating systems are smart enough to fully flush a drive that’s not actively being used, so it can be pulled at nearly any moment without risk. However, there’s always the chance that something is going to be written to any drive just as you’re pulling it. That’s the main risk of removing an active drive.

What happens when you drive with emergency brakes on?

I did this quite a few times in my first 4runner because the parking brake release was in a position I wasn’t used to. And I wouldn’t notice because the brake was weak so it didn’t slow the truck down too much. You will put more wear on the engine, but probably not more than if you were driving around with your trunk full of heavy items.Essentially you’ll wear out your parking brake. Do it enough times and you’ll have to start replacing parts if you want a working parking brake.I have a couple friends that towed a car 500–600 miles on a dolly with the parking brake on. After that it needed all new rear brakes - rotors, pads, and calipers because all the heat had caused the calipers to seize. Some cars the parking brake will act like a drum brake inside the hub of the rotor (for disc brakes), and some will use the actual brakes. Theirs used the actual brakes, otherwise they probably would just have no parking brake left but still have regular brakes.

What happens when you keep driving a very overheated car? Is it possible the car can burst into flame, or will the engine block just melt and your engine will die and that’s all that happens?

My wife did that to my Dodge Daytona, out of ignorance: “Honey, the car won’t go up into the driveway, and it smells TERRIBLE!”As soon as I went out the front door, a hundred feet away, I could smell it.The water pump had failed. If she had stopped and shut it down when the over-temp light came on, it would have been an easy fix. She kept driving it until the head warped and blew a head gasket. When I checked the oil, it was rusty brown (water in the oil). She also cracked the heater core. I bypassed it and told her to wear a sweater.I was in the Navy at the time, and the base had an auto hobby shop, so we towed the car there and I repaired it. Fortunately, the only engine casualty was the camshaft bearings (bad oil), so I ordered a high-performance camshaft (broke my heart) and had the head milled to fix the warp (which increased the compression ratio of the engine, which also broke my heart LOL) and did a valve job (basically, rebuilt the head).I was fortunate that the rest of the engine, including the turbo, were not damaged. After the rebuild, it also cured the car’s tendency to overheat under prolonged boost, maybe because of the new water pump. Afterwards, I could tow a travel trailer on the freeway under full boost for several hours with no problems.Except for the water pump design (had to replace it three times in six years), it was a great little car!I've had engines seize when they lost oil, for whatever reason, and I've overheated many when I was a teenager, but in every overheat case, the engine just stopped working until let it cool and replaced the coolant (and repaired whatever caused the loss of coolant, such as leaking hoses, or other failure, such as a stuck thermostat or broken fan belt).I've also run air-cooled engines with a broken fan belt (which means the only cooling was from the oil.), and they kept running a long time before blowing a head gasket. One was so hot, it had sparks coming out of the exhaust, but it kept running.

What will happen if you shift to manual mode while driving in an automatic transmission?

I’ve owned a few cars that have had a manual mode on an automatic box, and the answer is the same across all of them: They’ll sit in whatever gear they were currently in, and wait for you to change.If I’ve slowed down and failed to change down as I do, they’ve all downshifted for me even though I’ve been in manual mode. They might not necessarily have downshifted when I would have if I was driving myself, but they have done it.Once they’ve downshifted, I’ve not seen any of them try and upshift again. Apparently my current car will do it if you’re pushing it so hard that there’s a risk of damage, but I’ve not seen it for myself.

What would happen if, while driving a car, you shifted the gear from D to P while still moving forward?

It depends on the car and the speed you are moving.The transmission has a hook shaped piece of metal called a parking pawl. It looks like this:When you are in reverse, drive or neutral, the pawl is pulled back from the notch. When you put the car in park, the pawl tries to mate with the notch and when it does so, it prevents your car from moving. This is what keeps your car from rolling away on a hill after you park.If you move the shift lever into park while you are still moving, but you aren’t moving very fast, most cars will make a horrible racket as the parking pawl tries to fit into the notch. Most of the time, you just learn to not do that again, sometimes, you get to pay for someone to replace the pawl because it breaks.On some cars, the parking pawl won’t engage until the car is going under a certain speed, usually only single digits mph. Putting the car in park is similar to putting it into neutral on these cars.