I am wonder what you people would have done in my situation. Obviously non of you have been or you would not be asking why didn’t you do this or that. You have spit seconds to think and look around your surroundings not to hit someone or go onto a major highway from the area as was in, miss a big Chase bank sign and try to avoid a tree the best that you can. It was enough for me to keep control of the car and keep pressing on the brake as it was accelerating. I finally did hit the start/button to stop button after all this that happened.
Ed, I think those people are forgetting how fast a car might be going by the end of one reaction time if the engine is at full throttle. Our normal reaction at that point would be to steer and to brake. Those are the things we do naturally (along with swearing to holy heaven). If there are obstacles, then the driver is reacting multiple times. At no time would the driver be analyzing and correcting the problem since that would be a different process for the brain. Just think how many accidents happen because people don’t even brake and steer at the same time, ending in a collision.
I fell in a creek the other day. I was using stepping stones to cross it and slipped. The next thing I knew was that I was lying on my side in 18" of 40 F water. I had zero memory what occurred in the 1/2 second of fall, so that I surely had taken no conscious action during that time.
If you haven’t yet taken AARP’s Smart Driver course online, I strongly suggest it. Besides the reality that everyone can learn new strategies through a course like this, successful completion of this six-hour course will result in a discount on your car insurance.
I have driven for the past 51 years/600,000+ miles without even a scratched fender, but I take that course every 3 years just to make sure that I am fully aware of everything I should know, and to get a discount on my car insurance for the next 3 years.
I am sure this has never happened to you. I was coming out of a ATM with a large curb in front of me, as the car was accelerating and on the other side of the curb was grassy area and there was the highway. I managed to turn the car as I was going up the curb and miss going onto the highway, missing a Chase bank sign and barely hitting a tree. Would you really thought about placing the car in neutral after all this is going on and you are accelerating and braking at the same time. As I mentioned before I did manage to hit the start stop button to stop the car.
I have been in that situation and like I said I took it out of gear and and that was with a manual transmission where I also had to mash the clucth at the same time let the engine rev until I coasted to a stop to see what went wrong. As far as what you did I can’t comment any farther as I was not and did not see what happened or what else you could have done different.
In my view, all anyone can do is think some of this stuff out a little, in advance. Just ask yourself these questions, and come up with a reasonable answer. Whether you’ll do it at the right moment is anyone’s guess, but inventing a solution is better done in the quiet moments when you can think it through.
What I do know from enough experiences with collisions, equipment failures, sudden slides on ice or gravel, etc., is that the best solution is one you already know, and it always involves not doing something that’s going to make a bad situation worse. Don’t swerve suddenly, don’t hit the brakes as hard as you can, don’t let go of the steering wheel and cover your head with your arms. Try and drive it out, keep control and try to avoid sudden corrections that have the potential of taking control away completely.
One common thing that comes to mind is a driver falling asleep and waking when the car drifts off the road onto the dirt. The exact wrong thing is to slam on the brakes and yank the steering wheel to get back to the pavement. You will lose directional control immediately and when the front tires dig in while they are turned you’ll probably roll the car over.
The DOT has investigated this before and the finding is the same regarding other makes and models. Cut and pasted…and I’ve committed pedal misapplication a few times also; usually due to a bunched up floor mat or from a shoe slipping off the pedal.
The DOT concluded that, other than a number of incidents caused by accelerators hanging up on incorrectly fitted floor mats, the accidents were caused by drivers depressing their accelerators when they intended to apply their brakes. “Pedal misapplication” was the DOT’s delicate terminology for this phenomenon.
my friend’s daughter’s research on Toyota “sudden acceleration” topic back in 2011, quite interesting conclusions are on page 8:
I hope Toyota/Lexus took a good lesson from this, but who knows what new things were introduced in a later generation of drive-by-wire.
From the “black box” perspective, the event was recorded as “driver pushed the pedal down to the floor”, but in reality it might be a tin whisker shorting the circuit.
I would not automatically blame the driver here.
Like Renegade, I spent 40 years in trucking. I did have a case of unintended acceleration. Like Renegade I immediatly slipped it out of gear but the brakes were having no effect and I was in my daughters driveway heading for her car . Slowly but with no way to stop so I briefly poped it into reverse and back out which started it roling downhill to the street I repeated all this twice until my brain figured out what was wrong. I had to lift my right foot off the brake and gas pedal because it was on both and that freed up my left foot which was under the left side of the brake pedal.
Once I got my left foot out from under the pedal, everything worked fine. I did not feel any pressure on top of my left foot while it was happening. Must have been the adrenaline.
My unintended acceleration story. I, like one other contributor, had a 1959 Pontiac. Started to pull away from a curb, car started accelerating like I had floored it. Steered for a parking lot, both feet on the brake pedal, attempted to shift to neutral/park, nothing. At that poin I may have switched off the engine. Cause: broken motor mount, engine&transmission lifted causing mechanical linkage to open the carbuarator and preventing shifting of transmission.
The ES350 does 0-30 in 2.7 seconds. If it takes you 2.7 seconds to react to something, you need to either pay attention better, or stop driving because your reaction time has deteriorated too much.
The problem is not reaction time, the problem is forethought. In pilot training they will make you think about possible failures and what you will do. They will even induce certain failures to let you practice how to react to them. When you’re flying, if you’re doing it right, you’re supposed to conduct a briefing, even if you’re the only person in the plane, on what the takeoff will look like, and what you will do if problems arise at various stages of the takeoff. You’re thinking about that before you even get on the runway.
I’m not blaming the OP here, I’m blaming US driver training protocols. We’re basically taught under the assumption of a near-0 failure rate for vehicle systems. I think in my driver training we talked about what to do if a tire blew, and if the hood unlatched and opened into the windshield. That was about it.
If we were doing it right, we’d already be thinking, before we even started the car, “here’s what I’m gonna do if the car suddenly goes fast and I can’t stop it.” But few of us do it right, myself included. I freely admit I don’t think about that every time I drive. However it has been engrained into my subconscious that if the car is speeding up when I want it to slow down, priority 1 is to remove its ability to speed up, and that means slapping the shifter into neutral. I guarantee I could accomplish that task inside of 2.7 seconds.
It is possible to test one’s reaction time, online. There are several different sites, but this is the one that I used just last week:
I tested myself three times, and my reaction times were as follows:
36 years old
29 years old
24 years old
Since I am now 73 years old, this might help to explain why I have been able to drive for the past 51 years, 600,000+ miles without even a scratched fender.
Shifted into neutral, brake, dodge obstacles as best I can while avoiding any people near by. When I had on road Drivers Ed while I was in High School, my instructor (a retired PA State Trooper) had a specific lesson he did with me about shifting into neutral if something like this were to occur. He also covered how to use the hand break in an absolute emergency too. I also enjoyed that being a retired state trooper he is allowed to administer his own test so he made perpendicular parking pass/fail, but not parallel parking (which is what the “normal” road test is in PA. Frankly I find that to be completely stupid).
Reaction time 1: What the hell!!!
Reaction time 2: foot on the brake, hard!
Reaction time3,4,5: My god it didn’t stop!!! Harder, harder!! Which car am I in? Where is that OFF button? I’m dead!!!
Reaction time 6: I almost hit that post!! and a car is backing up!!
Reaction time 7: there’s a stroller in the road. TURN,TURN!
Reaction time 8: there’s no place to go!!!
Crash!!!
Reaction time9: is it over yet? Am I alive?
