What do you do if you’re stuck driving a recalled Toyota?

Toyota Motor Corp. said on Monday that it has already begun shipping a fix to the sticky gas pedal problem that forced the company to recall millions of vehicles and stop selling eight popular models.

Any wa y you do the math, that means it’s going to take weeks, maybe months, to get all the millions of recalled cars fixed, and that puts folks who drive one of the recalled Toyotas in a real fix. Many owners have parked their recalled Toyotas and using another family car, and some are even having to rent a car to commute in.

Those are the safest options.

Some folks, of course, just don’t have any options. They’re stuck with driving a recalled Toyota for a few more weeks, period, and they probably range from mildly concerned to basket-case worried. Will this perfectly good car turn into a uncontrollable demon with no warning? And if it does, what do I do?

I really can’t tell you what to do. But I’m driving a Toyota Avalon just out of the recall years, so I’ve been studying this and talking to a lot of Toyota drivers, and I’ll tell you what I’d do if I had to drive a recalled Toyota for a while longer. You’re grownups, you can use your own judgment.

First, I figure, the defective gas pedal is pretty rare. Millions of Toyotas are going billions of miles with only a few hundred taking off with a stuck pedal, so if I’m the gambling type, the odds are astronomically on my side.

Second, since I’m a Toyota owner and I know there’s a chance, however remote, that my gas pedal will get stuck, I can be prepared to respond perfectly if it happens. I, personally, would practice and get completely comfortable with each step the driving experts recommend to stop a runaway car. They seem simple but they may not be to everyone, and a driver has only a few seconds to get the car under control.

The experts say first to step on the brakes, hard. That should be instinctive – if my car’s going too fast, I apply the brakes with both feet.

The next step is not instinctive at all, but it’s the life-saving move. To slow a car with a stuck gas pedal, the experts say immediately shift the transmission to neutral – that’s the green N next to D on the transmission selector. To many drivers, N is just a meaningless extra bump between R and D, but actually it’s there for a purpose – it lets the engine rev without affecting the car’s speed. It mechanically allows the car to coast, no matter what the engine’s doing.

The reason I write this is that some Toyota owners I’ve talked with are shocked that in an emergency you can and should shift an automatic transmission out of D while you’re driving down the road. But that’s the one thing that must be done instantly to slow the car down, and no, it won’t hurt the car.

Some drivers say they’ve practiced slipping in and out of gear until they were comfortable with it and know they could react correctly in a split second. (They really don’t want to be figuring this out after the gas pedal’s stuck.)

That’s what I would do if I had to drive a recalled Toyota. I’d park it if I could, and get it fixed as soon as possible, but if I had to drive it, I’d be mentally ready for an emergency.

I’m not telling you what to do, of course, since everybody’s driving skills are different, but that’s how I’d deal with a stuck Toyota gas pedal.

Then I’d go shopping for a Ford.