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Unintended Acceleration Again!

Team Unintended Acceleration

It’s been about fifteen years now since the issue of unintended acceleration was the big thing in the publics mind. At that time auto maker Audi was the one who got the majority of the blame for this supposed action whereby cars would accelerate away all on their own. Today it’s Toyota. But fact is nearly every car at one time or another have had reports of this happening. Quite frankly the issue is not with the cars but is caused by drivers PUSHING ON THE WRONG PEDAL! In some really sad cases this error has caused injury and death. People didn’t want to accept this accident as driver error, to them it had to be a fault with the car and the bid bad uncaring corporations.

If you know anything about cars you know no car with operational brakes can overpower those brakes. Even it the throttle sticks wide open you only need to step on the brakes and the car will come to a stop, it may take slightly longer but it will stop. If you push on the brakes pedal and put the car in gear and push the gas pedal to the floor, the car will go nowhere, you may damage the transmission in the process but the brakes will hold the car. it would take a car with very poor brakes and lots of power indeed for the engine to overpower the brakes.

This does not stop media hype from playing on peoples fears. Audi suffered a decline in sales in the USA because of a report on TV’s 60 Minutes which purported to show that Audi automobiles suffered from this acceleration problem. Independent investigators concluded that this was most likely due to a close placement of the accelerator and brake pedals on Audi’s automatic transmission cars. You see unlike 1970 era American cars with their wide brake pedal and small gas pedal, Audi used pedal placement more in line with European tradition and derived from it’s manual transmission cars. Many Americans were now buying these cars due to higher gas prices, and being used to the American pedal arrangement found they had a tendency when not paying attention to confuse the two. It’s not like Audi was putting the gas pedal on the left and the brakes on the right, you could make a case that do so would be negligent, but using a pedal placement that millions of drivers both American and Foreign have had no issue with is not reckless. Get into most cars today and you will find this European pedal setup is very common.

There is nothing wrong with this pedal setup and it is in fact preferred by drivers who like high performance manual transmission cars. In race cars and high performance driving, when manually downshifting under heavy braking, the accelerator has to be used in order to match revs properly so both pedals have to be close to each other to be operated by the right foot at once, a driving technique called “heel-and-toe”, with the toe on the brake and heel on the accelerator while the left foot operated the clutch.

Well Toyota is now the maker suffering from this Unintended Pedal Confusion issue. The problem is the executives at Toyota have not learned from Audi’s mistake. They seem to be afraid to call the issues like it is, too afraid of offending customers and in the process looking guilty.