The elderly and buildings that jump in the way.

[madd1]

Last week an 80 year old woman crashed into a hair salon in Worcester Mass. Today, a 76 year-old man crashed his car into a bank. The reason for these two incidents? Why a stuck accelerator of course.
http://www.obscurestore.com/

As our population of boomers begins to age, can we expect to see a larger number of stuck accelerators?

Feel free to move this to Great debates if this turns into a silly NASCAR thread again.

[RoboDude]

I believe this was discussed here a while back. IIRC, some, if not most “stuck accelerator” incidents turned out to be caused by the driver stepping on the gas instead of the brake.

I believe it was also said that most cars do not have engines capable of overpowering the brakes, so if your accelerator really does get stuck, you should be able to bring the car to a stop and shut off the engine if you can’t unstick the pedal.

[home_schooled]

I think that in an emergency, even a percieved one, such as being startled by a proximate bicyclist, can cause anyone to revert to old learned reflex.

The reflex that most oldsters built up for years was on
stick shift cars, where you jam both feet on the clutch and brake.
On an automatic, of course, the engine will overcome the brake.

[MrWhy]

*Originally posted by home schooled *
**
On an automatic, of course, the engine will overcome the brake. **

Why do you assume this?

As RoboDude said, most agree that this is not the case.

[Dr.Lao]

*Originally posted by home schooled *
**On an automatic, of course, the engine will overcome the brake. **

I don’t believe this is the case. madd1 asked a similar question a few months ago in this thread. and Anthracite (the board’s coal and automotive diva) said this:

1. I do not believe there are any production cars in the world that have an engine that can overpower brakes that are actually working at even 50% of braking force. I have tested this theory many times with rental cars, and have never found one that could do it. Even my Mustang GT, with 300 lb-feet of torque, will very quickly stop with one foot full throttle on the gas, and one on the brake.

Q.E.D.

[Gunslinger]

An automatic with non-assisted 4-wheel drum brakes, though…(of course, this car’s 29.5 years old…)

[evilhanz]

Other factors including pedal placement cannot be ignored. In 1986, 60 minutes presented a grossly flawed report on the Audi 500 which supposedly had many cases of mysterious sudden acceleration. Here’s a quote from the National Review 6/21/93:

The Audi’s pedals were placed farther to the left, and closer together, than those in many American cars. This may well offer a net safety advantage, by making it easier to switch to the brake in high-speed emergencies. (The Audi had, and has, one of the best safety records on the road.) But it might also allow inattentive drivers to hit the wrong pedal.

However, most cases of “stuck” accelerators are due to driver inattention. Same source:

“Sudden acceleration” had been alleged in many makes of car other than the Audi, and from the start many automotive observers were inclined to view it skeptically. A working set of brakes, they pointed out, can easily overpower any car’s accelerator, even one stuck at full throttle. After accidents of this sort, the brakes were always found to be working fine. Such mishaps happened most often when the car was taking off from rest, and they happened disproportionately to short or elderly drivers who were novices to the Audi.

[tomndebb]

The reflex that most oldsters built up for years was on stick shift cars, where you jam both feet on the clutch and brake.

There is a remote possibility that this might have been true in the early 1960s. However, automatics have been outselling manual transmissions in the U.S. for 50 years or more and the older a person got, the more likely that they had been driving an automatic for many years. I’d be willing to bet that substantial numbers of people 60 - 75 have never driven a stick in their lives.