My Nissan Leaf Forum

My parking brake doesn't usually release when I press on the accelerator pedal, but I hadn't previously heard that your safety belt has to be on. Could be my problem...I'll have to investigate further.

As Vegastar said, the car will release the parking brake automatically only if you have your seat belt fastened. You had probably already taken your seat belt off because you were about to get out of the car.

Rat,

I suggest trying to reproduce the problem.

This is the first time I've heard of anything like this happening, and it would be a huge benefit to everybody to figure out how the car managed to get into this state.

I had not taken off my seat belt at the time of problem because I wasn't planning to exit the car until I had moved it forward. I also remember releasing it when I did later get out of the car after moving it. I did make one mistake in what I said earlier. I was not holding down the brake release lever when "gunning the engine", but I was repeatedly pressing it down so if I had accidentally stepped on the brake rather than the accelerator, it should have released the parking brake. I am also certain I had not accidentally put it in neutral since when I did hold the brake pedal and then push the parking brake lever, then released the foot brake, it began edging forward normally without me touching the shift lever. I am beginning to suspect that the repeated pressing of the brake release might actually have caused the release sequence to continually reset or restart, thus actually preventing the release, but I have no basis for this other than this experience and pure speculation.

Rat, 1st, glad to hear all is o.k. This type problem has been posted here a couple of times before in different settings. The one thing that sounds similar in all of them is rapid, almost simultaneous inputs from the driver on various controls. I've not posted in either of the other threads, but this sounds similar to a problem we had in the first few days with our Leaf. Twice, my wife called me from our driveway saying she could not get the car to go, and she too was locked in. In our other cars, she had the habit of trying to do everything at once, ignition, gear selection, brake release & acceleration were almost a single move for her, and the older style mechanical switches and linkage had no problem with multiple simultaneous inputs. I believe she did the same rapid inputs in the Leaf, but it seems the electronics just waited for some time to clear all the requests, then it operated normally. At least our problem disappeared. Unrelated coincidence? Possible, but it now works fine.

Pressing "Park" should unlock the doors. Trying to go forward does release the parking brake. In my experience, any time the car thinks you are being stupid, it beeps. And usually, that means, "Step on the brake, stupid!". I've even had it beep at me when my foot was on the brake, and I'm shifting into R. It still goes into R, so I think it's being a bit pedantic, like I tried to do it "too soon". It almost sounds like you had one of those rare instances when the computer gets confused and stops responding to your inputs. But I don't know. I thought I knew all the modes for this thing, but that "seatbelts fastened" item was a new one for me. So, you never know what extra factor might be in play.

Powering it off would be the wild card, though. It unlocks the doors, and usually clears all the confusion in the computer. Then again, if it's really confused, it would refuse to turn off. There has been the occasional report of that, too.

How was your daughter able to "escape" when the doors were locked?

None of my vehicles allow the opening of locked door while not in park, unless of course I choose to push the un-lock button or manually push the lock cam above the door handle. You can pull the door handle a hundred times and it's not going to open........that train will get ya'

I certainly don't want someone being able to walk up to my running, stopped car and being able to open a door.

Trapped in car - major safety problem....I think not

The first thing I did when I got the car was disable the auto-lock. I HATE not being able to pull the handle and get out at any time. It's not like I am going to accidentally pull the door handle when I'm driving. And to me it will make it easier for rescue to get to me if I were ever in an accident.

With that said you have to make sure it actually went into park before getting out of the car.

Gbarry, putting it in P does not unlock the doors. You have to turn the car off for them to automatically unlock.

Easy. She pushed the unlock button on her door, got out and closed the door.

Nor do I, but that's not the situation here, since I am only talking about it opening when I pull the INSIDE door handle. I keep my windows up so the bad guy can't get me. I'm much more worried about getting knocked off the road in an accident into a ditch or stream, etc. being upside down or sideways in total darkness with the car filling up quickly. In that situation I'm not sure I would have the presence of mind to reach to exactly the right position with my hand to hit either the power off button or the master unlock before grabbing the handle. I would be more likely to be able to find the relatively "great big" handle. If you prefer otherwise, that's fine.