Continuity

I had an amusing little encounter with a continuity problem during my work this morning. There's a scene that takes place in a car over about six pages. Near the beginning, I mention the car being put in gear and in so doing I mention reaching to the steering wheel column. The shifter is on the column. (Probably an automatic, though a few trucks have had standard transmissions with the shifter on the column.) At the end of the scene, I have a character moving from the passenger seat to the driver's seat by crawling "over the handbrake and stick shift."

I know how this happened is that I decided at one point to change the make of this car, and when I did so I did a little research and looked for images on google and ended up using that to revise one scene but forgot about the other.

What's amusing to me is that this kind of thing is still in there after so many readings. How have I not caught this before? And what else is lurking in there? Whenever I catch something like this in a published novel I'm always puzzled that the author and editor, who are presumably intimately familiar with every detail in the book, didn't catch it before, but I guess from this side of the table I can see that there are so many details to keep track of it's almost inevitable that I'll miss some.