Got into my car, while going to a friend's place. Found the shifter is stuck. I work on it for half an hour with no luck. Mom sees me working to try to fix it and offers to let me use her car today.
I use the car, and me and my friend decide to grab lunch at Wendy's. We leave the driveway and my mom's car makes a funny noise, I stop and call asking about the noise to make sure there isn't a problem. Mom never heard it before, so I cancel our lunch trip and head back home. Car stops making the noise soon as I get around the block, but I head home anyway, paranoid.
Get home, and explain what happened, but we don't see any problems with mom's car and the noise doesn't reoccur. I go back to working on my car, and find the shift lock override, and use that to work some oil into the mechanism after checking to make sure my tailights still work (which the manual says is a possible cause and a safety feature). And it shifts out of park again. It's hard about it, but it's possible so I call that a victory.
Then I play a little cataclysm. New character finds a car in the first garage I find, and drives it a total of 3 map tiles before careening into a minefield with it. WTF life, is this universal no cars for me day?
Status of my car is still unknown, letting it sit a day before seeing if that fixed it. Mom's car was a problem that my dad knew about that mom didn't, and was harmless. Cataclysm car is missing a wheel but otherwise functional.