I am more impressed that the input shaft didn’t snap, or break the drive shell, or shear a spline, or the rear pinion at the yoke or U-Joint, or something in the drive line doing a 5K neutral drop …
But you can go to about any drag race track and watch even the daily drivers with DOT slicks red light cause they pushed through the beams instead of stopping when they are foot braking it and either the brakes can’t hold it or the tires slide… it all depends on the tire grip on each end and the HP etc… but normally yes the brakes win, but not in every case…
2005 and newer Grand Cherokee have electronic throttle control: if the brake pedal is held, the throttle will close as a failsafe, but not instantly.
Shifting from park while at full throttle is foolish, if this was and older vehicle that would actually engage into gear there is a great possibility of damage.
The rev limiter while in park is usually 3000 - 4000 rpms. I think the authors perception of these events is skewed.
Been there, in the mid '60s, my older brother and I were going out on a really cold winter day in up-state New York… His car was an early '60s Rambler (six-cylinder, automatic with shift buttons on the dash) and it was running rough and there was no heat yet…
At the first stop light, he shifted it into neutral and gunned the engine to try to warm it up faster… When the light turned Green, he pushed the Drive Button, without letting the engine spin down, and the car seemed to lurch ahead a couple of inches right before we heard a loud bang from the rear end.
And then no drive, no matter how much gas he gave it… I got out and started pushing it to get it out of the intersection and then it suddenly started to move on its own, then a crunch, then again some more power to the wheels, and more crunch, and that was how it was until we got it to the side of the road.
After we got it home and opened up the rear end, the pinion gear had sheared off several teeth of the ring gear. Since he did not shut the engine off, and it was left in drive, when the car moved enough to bring good teeth on the ring gear to the pinion gear, we had some drive… He junked the car; he said he never liked Yellow anyway… (its color…)
I had said watch even daily drivers and foot braking it and was not meaning with line locks… Yes I know some of the newer factory hot rods come with factory line locks… I guess hill holds can be added also… lol
But yes a line lock only holds the brakes it is mounted to, mostly front brakes, but for the JDM FWD tuners, the rear brakes…
A line lock is mainly used for the burn out box (or just burn outs) on automatics and then trans breaks at the beams, OE Standard shifts, which is getting rare for drag racing now a days, (can) uses line locks…
Line locks only hold the amount of pressure you apply to the foot brake before activating the line lock, normally you pump your brakes a few times and hold the pedal down hard before hitting the line lock button, meaning that just hitting it once may not have enough pressure to hold the vehicle from rolling through the beams, and then even if the brakes hold, doesn’t mean the tires will not just slide allowing the vehicle to inch forward…
So the reason for a trans brake, it locks 2 gears at the same time, mainly forward and reverse, a vehicle can/will not move when locked in forward/reverse gears…
My whole point to all this is that, as a lot of the members like to say on here, don’t use a blanket statement, brakes do not always win…
Couldn’t agree more with you, about the comment “don’t make blanket statements”.
My point was that I never drove a car that the brakes wouldn’t overpower the engine, but I’ve never driven a race car. I was talking about factory cars, factory performance cars and modified cars, but not race cars. Your comment referenced above may be true for your car, or a race car, but not MOST cars, and not the factory cars that this thread started about.
Allow me to introduce you to my 420 hp Mustang. Full throttle overcomes the rear brakes, spins the rear tires and pushes the car forward sliding the fronts and I have 14 inch brake rotors all around. It doesn’t leap forward but it doesn’t stay still either.
And those muscle cars of the 60s have been out powered by modern cars by a wide margin.
If a vehicle is stationary and you have the brakes applied, it is very unlikely that if the engine suddenly accelerated, it will overcome the depressed and applied brakes.
What seems to be missing here is that in these situations where the vehicles have suddenly surged ahead; the driver has to come to the realization that their car is racing ahead, whether it was the driver inadvertently stepping on the gas pedal or a mechanical malfunction.
What is the reaction time and what might seem like an almost instantaneous response to the vehicle racing ahead, you need to remember, the mass of the vehicle is already moving and if the brakes are applied immediately, it takes time to stop and that would explain how the vehicle jumped the curb, and smashed into the building.
And then there is the panic situation where the driver simply freezes and takes no action until someone reaches in the window and shuts off the vehicle and drags the driver out screaming that they did nothing wrong and they do not know what happened… “It wasn’t my fault, I did nothing wrong, etc…”
I thought he had a collection of K cars. Missed the part where he mentions a Shadow.
I had a Dodge Rampage, cable operated clutch, cable busted when the vehicle had about 4,000 miles on it.
No system is perfect.
+1
I can add that my 2011 Outack also had an electronic parking brake, and in the 11 years/140k miles that I owned it, it was never problematic. But, if it had failed, Subaru provided a lifetime warranty on it.
I might have related this experience here before but it bears repeating. I was plowing snow a couple years back and was wearing a pair of boots. Lots of back and forth with the truck. Never happened before but I managed to step on both the brake and gas pedal at the same time. I was perched at the top of an embankment with the front tires at the crest about to go down it.
The harder I pressed the brake, the harder I also pressed the gas pedal. It took what seemed like an eternity for my mind to reconcile what was happening. in reality it was a few seconds. Meanwhile, I was edging toward the precipice. I managed to figure it out and rock my foot off the gas while maintaining brake pressure.
I like to think I have all my mental faculties but it was still hard to reconcile when it happened so suddenly. I can’t imagine how disconcerting something like that might be for an elderly person with diminished capacity- either physical or mental. And I didn’t go over the edge (or crash into a storefront) which would probably have been even more traumatic.
The probability of human error causing these events is orders of magnitude more likely than a system failure where there are at least two methods of protection built into the design. I believed it before this happened to me but even more so afterward…
If someone had been looking, they would have seen my brake lights on and heard the engine racing at the same time.
@bcohen2010 says above there were considerably more unintended accelerations on Camry’s with electronic throttle control vs mechanical cable control. If that’s actually the case, it deserves more consideration. Just b/c some electronic-throttle Camry’s haven’t experienced this problem isn’t sufficient reason to dismiss the possibility there’s some systematic problem involved with the Camry’s electronic throttle control.
Is there a dispute about the accuracy of the claim that there’s statistically more unintended accel on Camrys with electronic throttle control vs cable?
George, you don’t remember the huge unintended acceleration issue? That it was studied, and not found to be caused by the software in a NASA study. No clear cause, other than driver mistakes and stuck floor mats, was ever proven. Could something have caused it? Sure, but the fact that the problem pretty much went away tells me it was driver and floor mats, not other stuff.
but it was still hard to reconcile when it happened so suddenly. I can’t imagine how disconcerting something like that might be for an elderly person with diminished capacity- either physical or mental. And I didn’t go over the edge (or crash into a storefront) which would probably have been even more traumatic.