I understand the danger inherent in a short couple of seconds where one’s accelerator sticks at a bad time and you’re (of course) not expecting that; that’s not the scenario I’m talking about.
No, I mean this kind of thing:
… a prolonged ongoing crisis of “oh fuck, vehicle careening out of control, the freaking gas pedal is stuck!”
What the fuck am I missing?
Automatic transmission: shift into neutral. Bring car to a halt. Turn car off.
Manual transmission: shove in the clutch. Hit the brakes, bring car to a halt. Turn car off.
The video does say the driver tried all the things you suggested and it did not work.
I am amazed at so many failures though. Transmission should have nothing to do with the accelerator. Unless somehow everything is controlled by computer and the computer went nuts.
Either the computer went nuts or the driver went nuts.
It also isn’t just one computer, and I don’t know enough about them to know if some bizarre bug in the engine control computer causing it to stick at full throttle would somehow be related to the transmission control computer not being able to shift.
Could some kind of storm on the CANBUS prevent messages from the controls reach the computers? I’m sure this is the kind of thing engineers think about. I can accept that an unlikely series of problems leads to an unanticipated failure mode, but sometimes the simplest explanation is human error.
I haven’t watched the video, so I don’t know exactly what went on, but it is quite possible that the driver doesn’t know how to put the car in neutral, or force it to turn off.
“Sudden unintended acceleration” as caused by “the computer” randomly opening the throttle on its own is basically a myth. No one has ever verified, under valid scientific testing conditions, that it has happened in any car.
These situations are caused by:
Confused, impaired, or otherwise bad drivers who hit the wrong pedal and panic. In their mind they are “pressing the brake” and the accelerator is untouched and “the car is moving on its own.” They don’t think to take braking actions because they’ve convinced themselves they are doing it already and it’s not working.
Poorly designed or installed floor mats physically catching on the accelerator and depressing it, or other objects (rolling bottles, etc) doing so.
Extremely poor and nonstandard car design - this is sort of a subset of 1 but less preventable by just trying to make everyone a good driver. The Tesla “one pedal driving” mode is notorious for people creating unintended outputs because they apply their decades of intuition on how cars are supposed to work to a “let’s do it differently for no reason” Elon-mobile. One second of forgetting you’re in the Special Car That Doesn’t Work That Way can lead to disaster. A cousin to this is the cruise control in older cars, which could be activated too easily without giving visual feedback.
You’re missing the major incentive to lie from people who don’t want to admit that they caused an accident, possibly with a lot of legal liability involved for crashing into someone else’s car or injuring/killing them, and trial lawyers looking to flip that into a nine-figure payout from the car manufacturer. That’s the reason people pretend SUA from “the computer” exists.
I’ve never tried it because I’m not insane, but if you press the accelerator all the way and press the brakes all the way at the same time, will a car move?
I don’t think you understand how it works. If you hit the brake, the car will stop, just like any other car. If you get confused you can just not press anything and the car will also stop. If you hit both pedals at once, the brake overrides the accelerator and the car will stop. If you hit the accelerator and didn’t mean to, you’ll probably crash into something, just like any other car. Though if the car is convinced there’s something ahead of you it will sometimes prevent it.
Ironically, you aren’t applying the same level of skepticism to complaints about Teslas as you do with other types of car. It’s almost always some form of user error filtered through the lens of someone that doesn’t correctly remember what they did because they didn’t know what they were doing at the time.
EVs in general have one advantage over ICE cars. ICE cars usually use a vacuum boost for the power brakes. This can become depleted over multiple brake applications, especially at high throttle. But EVs have electric boost and can’t run out of brake boost.
FWIW…if you watch the video, the police are on the phone with the driver and they tell the driver to try the brakes, put it in neutral, turn the car off and so on. The driver claims they are trying all of that but none of it works.
The police catch up to the driver, pull in front and use their cars to brake and stop the runaway car.
So, while there was probably some minor damage, no one was hurt and it all ended well so not an insurance dodge.
Maybe the teenager driving just figured this was how he could drive really fast and not get busted.
I have NO idea what went wrong with that car (if anything) and I agree it seems a really unlikely set of failures bordering on unbelievable.
I’d be interested in a follow-up to this if it ever comes.
So unless there’s a problem with the brakes - which I understand is very rare - then pressing the brakes really hard should solve any problem with the car, at least temporarily.
As others have said, as long as your brakes are in reasonable condition, the car will not move. Or if it is moving, it will stop.
However, if you don’t push the brakes hard enough to stop the vehicle (because you are panicking or whatever), the brakes can overheat, the brake fluid can boil, and your brakes stop working.
This happened to me once, many years ago, in a car with a manual transmission. I pushed in the clutch, let off on the gas pedal, and the engine immediately revved up into the redline. I let off the clutch to keep the engine revs at a sane level, used the brakes to keep the car at a reasonable speed until I could pull over to the side of the road (I was in the middle lane on I-270 coming out of Washington DC at the time), then turned the key to shut off the engine and easily stopped on the side of the road.
It wasn’t the typical floor mat issue. The throttle cable got stuck for some reason, and even though nothing was touching the gas pedal, it would only come partially up when I took my foot off of it. I stomped on the gas pedal a few times, and whatever dirt or whatever had gotten stuck worked its way loose and the car operated normally after that. This was after dark, so the next day I popped the hood open and and looked for what might have caused the throttle cable to stick, but whatever it was didn’t leave any evidence behind. I never had a problem with the car ever again though.
I think the biggest thing was that I didn’t panic. I was just like “huh, that’s weird,” then I dealt with the problem.
If the engine doesn’t have a rev limiter, just pushing in the clutch or shifting into neutral could
cause the engine to self-destruct.
Had this happen in a Ford Ranger pickup decades ago. I think it was probably something in the cable going to the accelerator mechanism, but it certainly could have been a floor mat.
I put in the clutch and the engine revved up and bounced against the limiter.
I then had the stupid idea of turning off the key while I was still moving. This worked, and I was able to get to the side of the road and restart, and everything was good.
Why is turning off the key stupid? Because there is a steering wheel lock that will engage. Imagine rolling along at 35 mph when the steering wheel locks!
Old-fashioned ignition keys have separate “off” position & “lock the steering and remove the key” positions.
When the steering locks were first introduced (late 1960s), they were required to have an interlock. From the “on” position they key cannot be turned past “off” to “lock” unless the transmission selector is in “park” on an automatic transmission.
I do not recall how the interlock worked on a manual transmission, but IIRC they had interlocks too. Maybe it was as simple as “push in the key”. Which could be screwed up in a panic.
I too had a throttle cable stick on a 1970s manual transmission car. I turned the key from “on” to “off”, pushed in the clutch, shifted to neutral, and coasted to a stop.
Later sold that car and a few days later heard back from the buyer. The cable had stuck again but his response was press in the clutch, let the engine rev way past redline until it exploded (no limiter in those days), then coast to a stop. His call was to get me to buy him a new engine since I sold him a defective car. Yeah sure I will. Idjit.
IIRC, Toyota had a “floor mat problem” a few years back where it was alleged the mats could dislodge and jam the accelerator open. When the black boxes were examined after accidents, the examinations revealed people panicked and stomped the accelerator instead of the brake. Toyota noted this and also engineered a fix for the non-existent mat problem as part of a PR campaign.
Huh. Now I feel better, knowing I wasn’t risking flaming death. Cool.
I might have had the presence of mind to carefully turn the key off without it going to the “take the key out” position, and therefore never put the interlock to the test. It was 30 years ago, and I was understandably distracted in the heat of the moment.
I now recall that manual transmission cars often had a small mechanical lever near the keyhole that you could reach with your thumb while turning the key. That lever had to be pushed or pressed or whatever to let the key get past “off” to “lock”. Others you applied pressure inwards, along the key’s axis against a spring to depress the whole lock assembly enough to clear the interlock.
The problem, as you inadvertently alluded to, is that most people never use that “off” position. So to them the entire ignition switch only has two hand-actions associated with it: “Insert key, turn all the way to ‘start’ & release”, and “Grasp key, push manual release lever / push key inwards, rotate key all the way to ‘lock’, and remove key”.
If that’s all you (any you) intellectually know about your ignition switch and is the only muscle memory you’ve ever practiced, well that’s 99.9% certainly what you’d do in a stuck throttle emergency.
I certainly did whatever was needed (e.g. pressing the button by the key), since that was just part of turning the key off. There is no way I would have realized “this silly button is there to prevent the steering wheel locking while in motion”
Surely that’s buried in the owner’s manual somewhere, for those who read their owner’s manual from cover to cover.
