Hi all. 2010 JCW here, 90,000 miles.

I went to back my car up into the driveway this morning and heard a small pop from under the center console as I put it in reverse. When I went to give it gas, the car was in first and went forward! I shifted to neutral and there was massive shifter play, like a couple inches, as if the return springs were not there. If I put the car into 5th/6th, then the return spring feel returns, and will go forward like normal, but as soon as I try to put it in reverse, it's back to sloppy shifter until I put it back in 5th/6th.

I checked the linkage under the hood on top of the tranny and everything seems to be normal there, linkage returns to neutral position like it should, even when the shifter in the cabin is sloppy. Car runs and drives forward fine, but no reverse. Is this a transmission problem, or a shift linkage/cable problem? I'm not sure how the reverse lockout thing works, but I have a feeling it's something to do with that.

 

Ask someone to operate the shifter while you observe the links movements. The reverse is when you pull up on the mechanism (on top of the transmission). You can also have someone press clutch while you manually put it reverse to see if it the tranny or the shifter.

 

Nice advice, that's actually exactly how I worked it out. The transmission end of one of the cables had a missing c-clip and the plastic bushing on the ball end was broken, luckily I found the pieces. Had to get a new circlip, though. If for some reason anyone else runs into this issue, a 5/16ths circlip works fine, I assume its around an 8mm, but my local stores didn't have metric clips.

 

glad to hear good news