While in my garage for a few days, I left the map lights on in the car.  The result: a dead Battery.  Not just a "sort of dead battery" that has enough current to run some of the electronics in the car, it was a "really dead battery" that didn't have enough juice to do much of anything.

Push then Jump

The Freestyle was in the garage, head first and my jumper cables couldn't reach from my running car to the dead battery.  To get the Freestyle within jumper cable range, I needed to push it out of the garage, which meant I needed to put the car in neutral.  For your safety (no sarcasm, this is a great safety feature), cars include an interlock between the brake and shifter, requiring your foot on the brake before you can shift into gear.  The interlock is a switch and a solenoid on the shifter to release a pin to allow the shifter to move -- a classic design requiring electricity to work, and, as it happens, my car was absent enough electrons do the job. 

Sure, disassemble the dashboard

No problem!  Cars include an override for just this event.  Most of the time, it's next to the shifter accessible with a valet key or screwdriver, kept under a little panel held in place by coffee and Cheetos residue.  After searching, and searching, I resorted to an act of true desperation: I read the manual (gasp!).  Whereupon I found instructions on page 198 that seemed to be telling me to disassemble the center console.  Really?  Yes.

Here's what I needed to do.  Took about 15 minutes, about 14 minutes longer than it should have.

1. Safety
Before you start, belt and suspenders!  Apply the parking brake and put a chock on both sides of a wheel.  This keeps the car from drifting forwards or backwards.  This is the wrong time to discover the slope of your garage/driveway faces the house/pool/orphanage as two tons of car rolls about uncontrolled.  If stuck on an incline, this is one of the times I'd recommend seeking professional assistance. Also, I feel the need to point out once the car starts rolling, just get out of the way, you're not going to stop it, you'll just get run over.


2. Removing a trim panel from around the shifter
For this job, I deployed my Harbor Freight nylon prying tools.  There's a set for just interior trim, but the "all purpose" set live up to their name.  
3. Removing the console (use two hands, pull upwards!)
Looks dirty under there.  I also found some receipts and a debit card hiding in this area. Not really sure how these got to their final resting spot, there's not much of a gap between the console and the rest of the dashboard.  But stuff has a habit of getting where it doesn't belong.
A bunch of plastic clips like what you see below hold the center console in place, they look like they're designed to tolerate occasional removal, so somebody in the depths of the engineering department expected this to happen over the life of the car, or maybe this is what they had in the CAD system's collection of fasteners and the valued engineering resource responsible for this part just did a cut/paste before heading out to lunch.



4. Loosening a screw to remove a safety cover over the switch, press button
The safety cover with a screw underneath the center console seems like the result of some regulation, or lawsuit, or maybe I'm witnessing some serious over-engineering.

There's the button!  Just press while also pressing the release on the gear shifter and we're in neutral.  From the pictures, you might notice it being a bit dirty, this picture fully documents the crud hiding in the center console gear shift:

I sprayed with liberal mounts of LA's Totally Awesome Cleaner I used for the rest of the interior and put my best efforts into making this cleaner.  

Off we go

Removed wheel blocks and pushed car out of the garage after releasing the parking brake.  This is a two person job, have somebody sitting in the car ready to press the brakes. Jumping the car was uneventful.  (Yes, I was very careful to attach the last cable far away from the dead battery.)  Re-assembly didn't require much effort and my car's just a little bit cleaner as well. Might want to stash a cheap Phillips head screwdriver in the glove compartment, just in case you need to do this in the field.