NHTSA Complaint #11458266 — 2014 FORD ESCAPE

I was driving in Manhattan and stopped on East 5th Street in the East Village on my way home at around 7 pm. I stopped the car on a bit of a diagonal in the middle of the street in order to get out and quickly hand something off to someone there. I put the car in park and stepped out for maybe 30 seconds without even closing my door. Then when I got back in and tried to drive the car I had no ability to shift into any gear. The gear shifting didn’t click in in any way. The car didn’t register as in park. No lights highlighted the gear on the dashboard. The 4 tires were locked but the steering wheel moved freely and everything else in the car seemed to be perfectly fine. No warning lights came on. We turned the car off and back on many times hoping the computer system would resolve the issue - but that never changed the situation. I could not drive this car. I could not move the car. I was blocking other cars. I called AAA which took an hour and a half to get to me. I had AAA put the car on a flat bed truck and bring it to my Darien CT driveway ( at great expense) and then the next morning spoke with my Ford dealership and had AAA move the car to the dealership While now having to take a subway and a train to get back to Darien I looked up what could be wrong and discovered there had been a recall of many 2014 Escapes in 2018 to replace a faulty bushing which could detach from the transmission cable and make it impossible to control the gears. MY ESCAPE WAS NOT RECALLED - BUT IT CERTAINLY SHOULD HAVE BEEN because that is exactly what happened. This was very dangerous and expensive. I’m extremely disturbed that had my Escape been fixed in this recall this then would not have happened to me. And my life would not have been in jeopardy. What if this happened minutes later when I was again driving in NYCity or on the highway ? The Ford dealership in Stamford CT discovered that “the shifter cable bushing on transmission is broken and not connected to transmission…”