It’s any parent’s nightmare: watching from afar as their children buckled into a car roll away down a hill. This nightmare became reality for one reddit user. Thankfully, their minivan stopped a few feet away. But the entire fiasco started when they proceeded to “turn down the volume, and step out of the car.”

An increasing number of makes and models are saving interiors space by swapping a bulky gearshift lever for a shift knob. Chrysler Corporation is leading the charge. The Chrysler Pacifica minivan is one of many new vehicles with a rotating knob that has positions for Park, Reverse, Neutral, Drive, and Low Range. When I first saw the shift knob, I actually joked about confusing it for the volume. But didn’t imagine it would happen.

I posted a picture of a car with its rear axle ripped out, as if it had shifted into reverse while driving forward, and said I didn’t trust my pre-caffeine self with a shift knob. And all jokes about my coffee addiction aside, I underestimated just how distracting a van full of kids can be. And that’s what got the redditor in quesiton.

Apparently the family was running late, and “the kids were being fussier than usual.” After everyone was strapped in, the parent hopped inot the driver’s seat and found a pile of snack wrappers, used water bottles, and napkins around the front passenger seat. So they tried to grab the trash, dial the Chrysler into park, and get out to throw the handful of junk away. But what actually happened was, “grab the trash, turn down the volume, and step out of the car to throw it away.”

Yup, the driver reached up and twisted the volume knob. Then, thinking the vehicle was in park, they got out. They claim in several years of ownership, this has never happened. But when their feet hit the ground, expecting to feel the car lurch to a stop behind them, they realized it was still rolling. Downhill. Luckily, the neighbor’s car was just a few feet away and the Pacifica gently bumped into it.

The writer admits,”I got really lucky.” The entire street is at enough of an incline, the van would have just kept going. There wasn’t much damage to either car. The kids may have felt “rattled” but they were fine.

Few of the commenters on Reddit came down hard on the storyteller. One made a good point, “This is why I think shift knobs are dangerous, especially when surrounded by other knobs.” So while the shift lever being a knob is not inherently dangerous, the vehicle’s layout could be misleading.