3 times I have gone to upshift, thinking that I am in manual shift mode , whenI was actually in drive. The result being instant high revs as I had actually shifted into neutral- scared the living **** out of me! Why am I not locked out of neutral??
I have done he shift mechanism check in the bentley manual and everthing seems to be in order.
Well, I suppose this was a good test of my recent timming belt change. This cannot have been designed this way!
Someone please tell me mine is " out of whack "

no bro mine does it too it goes frm D to N to R without locking and bk without locking, i have a 99 a6 2.8

My car is identical to yours. I cannot fathom why the would design it this way. am I missing something here?
Would really be interested in comments? BENG

hahaha no clue man, it is wierd i dk either , , mine only locks in neutral when i leave it in neutral for like a good 5 sec

Many cars (perhaps even most cars) don't lock a person out of neutral from the drive position and there are several reasons for not doing so. If you ever drove in winter conditions you will surely know how much faster you can stop your vehicle when you put the car in neutral as there is no drivetrain inertia involved. This really isn't much of an issue with ABS and ESP equipped Audi's, but it is still common for cars to allow the driver to shift into Neutral from Drive without pushing the shifter button.

You will also notice the car should not allow you to push it any farther up into the Reverse position, and this should be obvious why that would be a bad thing. If you needed to push the button to get into Neutral, there is a chance you could accidentally slide into Reverse as well, and that wouldn't be a good thing at highway speeds (not that it is a big deal, but it would kill the engine and could result in some drivetrain damage in extreme cases).

However, the primary reason the transmission is set this way is byallowing the car to shift into Neutral without the button, it allows the driver to know what gear they are in without having to look at the indicator. Let's say you park in a garage or parking space that requires you to back up each morning. You push the button to get out of park and the gear selector moves into Reverse. When you are done backing up, you don't push the button, but rather just slide the gear selector back until it stops - which puts you into Drive.

Now let's say you normally park head out - meaning you don't need to go into reverse right away. In this case you push the button on the gear selector and as you slide into reverse gear you can let off the button and just keep sliding the gear selector down until it stops - putting you right into drive. Of course in your Audi you also need to have the brake pedal on, but that is a whole separate discussion.

If there was some type of a lock between Neutral and Drive it would be a huge pain and would require you to look down at the indicator each and every time you shifted from Park into any gear just to be sure you were where you thought you were. In fact, the way things are engineered allows you to always know positively what gear is selected without taking your eyes off the road and allows a person to subconsciously select the gear they want without even having to think about it.

Trust me - if there was an interlock between N and D you would hate it. I'd suggest just being a little more aware of whether your are in Tip mode or not before making an assumption during hard acceleration. When it doubt, just push the stick to the right a little before upshifting to have a positive confirmation that you are in Tip mode.

You could also glance at your dash display to see if it shows the normal P, N, D, R, S or 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 - but that would require your eyes to be off the road which may or may not be a good idea during an upshift. I suppose you could just cut a pencil to fit between the shaft of the gear selector and the shifter gate that prevents you from pushing the gear selector forward, but that would seem to be a safety issue and would require you to pull it out every time you wanted to park.

My original advice is probably best. Just be more aware of whether you are in Tip mode or not, and if you still are having problems just keep the damn thing in D and call it aday.