What affect could this have had on my automatic transmission?

Ok so I was parked on a hill and the car engine was off, then without starting the car I shifted to reverse (I thought the car was on) and the car began to move backwards… My brakes were not working (because the car was 'off'), I then shifted the car to neutral as I was going backwards and then park - it is here where I heard a fast clicking sound and the car finally came to a stop. I drove around afterwards and everything was fine. By the way this is a 2012 honda civic LX automatic.

The transmission has a 'parking pawl' inside it that hooks into one of the gears & stops it from rolling. The clicking was this pawl running on top of the gear teeth until it caught one & the car stopped.

The parking pawl was trying to engage was the clicking sound and lucky for you it eventually was able to catch. In the future always, and I mean always, apply the parking brake. Always! That keeps a dangerous situation like that from happening.

That brake is often called the emergency brake as well and you had a sure fire emergency going on and it was the time to be using it and not attempting to damage your transmission. Please, please, please get very familer with that brake and always use it when parking. You could have easily hit something if in the wrong place when that happened or worse yet hurt or killed someone.

Please watch the video links I'm giving you. It tells you how important it is to use it and how much pressure the weight of the car is putting on your transmission when you only use park without the brake applied.

Please don't think I'm fussing at you about this. I'm simply trying to make sure you now realize how incredibly dangerous it is to park your car without using the parking brake. It's best to learn that now that you've had this one very dangerous close call than to have to learn this lesson in the future when someone has been hurt.

Good luck to you and now start using that parking brake. Always!


My brakes were not working (because the car was 'off')
FALSE. The braking system is 100% independent from the engine being on or off.

Have the vehicle inspected As soon as possible. Either your description is not reality, or your brakes are just about dead.