In December of 1999 I bought a MY2000 Audi S4 right off the delivery trailer, even paid over MSRP. It was silver with a silver leather interior; beautiful car.
The next weekend I took my wife out to a fancy restaurant downtown LA. After dinner we go out to the valet and several minutes go by. He comes back and says he cannot get the car out of park. He walks me over to the car and sure enough it won't come out of park. I call the dealership, who is just about to close, and they give me several suggestions which don't work. The service manager finally comes on and says "Straddle the gearshift and pull as hard as you can, you'll probably get it to move enough to at least roll the car out of the lot and onto a flatbed. If you break something, no problem, we have to fix it anyway." So that's what I did and sure enough it worked, the car got towed and we took a taxi home. Turned out to be the little solenoid. They had to swap one from another new delivery because there were no parts available yet.
I subsequently put 200K miles on that car, including MANY track days with the Audi club, and never had a serious problem. Pretty amazing for a twin turbo V6 AWD car as complex as that one was.
