PJ O'Roorke's "Parliament of Whores" has a chapter about "Sudden Acceleration Incidents" and the investigation and politics thereof that your piece reminds me of (and it's an entertaining read).

http://tinyurl.com/yhkq6k9 - Link to Google books for this chapter (using tinyurl because the URL is truly massive). A few pages missing because it's a "preview".

Excellent link! I've been looking for a term to stand in place of "we're not allowed to blame ordinary people for ordinary problems," and I think O'Rourke's term "blameless citizenry" is exactly that term.

This issue has been going on for 25 years, that was written in like 1986. Are the people with sudden acceleration issues today the same people that had them 25 years ago? Or is it a new generation? I wonder what would be revealed if complaints were mapped geographically and demographically, 25 years later.

I had an automatic 2000 Chevy Cavalier that I drove lightly around my second home when I visited it every few weeks. About 2 years in I came to red light and, in applying the brake, it fought as though I was stomping on the gas pedal. I regularly drive stick so I popped it in neutral as I brought it to the side of the road and the engine kept revving despite neither of my feet being on any pedal.

I turned off the car and re-started it without any problems so I took it to my mechanic down the street and had a friend pick me up. The mechanic gave a full run-through and basically didn't believe me.

I drove the car around for another few months without incident until I was taking a longer drive at night on I-95. The car started unexpectedly accelerating so I removed both feet from the pedals and it kept speeding up.

Long story short, this happened several more times (I have low risk-aversion) despite having the electrical system replaced and having numerous mechanics that I know and trust look at it. Before I just gave up on it (annoyed - I like to know what is wrong) one of my mechanics took it out for a drive just to try it out and had it got away from him as well. We never did figure out what caused it.

Right, I want to be clear: I'm not saying cars don't accelerate on their own. In your case, you had an actual mechanical problem and did the right thing which prevented a tragedy. I knew a Ford Taurus owner with that sort of problem, as well. My point was that the big-story cases with Toyota (and Audi of the past) focus on these harrowing "I was pressing the brake as so hard that I hurt my ankle" kind of stories where we're not allowed to second guess the driver's actions.

There was a case in Minneapolis some years back where a police van accelerated, from a stop, and killed at least one person during some festival of lights thing. What they found, eventually, was that the police department wiring modifications from the stock van (to get the cherries and strobes working correctly) could cause the police vans to accelerate on their own. It wasn't a manufacturer issue, but it was still scary stuff.

That's fair enough. I've driven long enough to see that we all do plenty of stupid-enough things in a fully-functioning car.

Did the car have drive by wire? My pickup ('84 toyota) had a sticky throttle plate. Only just enough to make it idle way too high, not enough for runaway acceleration, (and some wd-40 fixed it), but could happen to other cars too I imagine.

I think a lot of the outrage is justly squared on the possibility that Toyota covered the issue up for years.

I've been driving for a long time, a few years shy of 20, and I even polled my father who's been driving for something like 65 years, at one point as a professional long haul truck driver. If we add up all the times we've accidentally hit the gas when we meant to hit the brakes, we come up with zero cases. That's about 80 years of combined, daily, multi-hour a day driving.

Of course there are cases where this happens, usually with the elderly around a farmer's market. But this doesn't appear to be the case. Other manufacturers have had various dangerous issues, and they take care of them pretty quick.

It's the ones that are denied for a decade, then internal memos are leaked where they coldly calculated the cost of a recall vs. the cost of lawsuits from the loss of human life that stand out in history....anybody remember the Pinto?

> That's about 80 years of combined, daily, multi-hour a day driving.

Not to belittle your point, but you're making a common mistake. Just because "80 years" feels like a big number doesn't make it significant.

You've presented the data point of two (2) drivers. On the other hand, there are hundreds of millions of drivers, just in the USA. Even a vanishingly small percentage of failure cases would still cause hundreds of failures, across so many billions of hours of driving. And easily not appear in any sample of two drivers' experience, no matter how much driving they've done.

You do make an important point. I was simply attempting to counter one anecdote with another. But I think the argument of "the pedals are too close so people are probably just hitting the wrong one", while an interesting thought exercise, digresses from the actual problems:

1) The cars made by Toyota, on occasion, even when under the control of an experienced driver, with years of experience with not only that make/model of vehicle, but even with that exact vehicle, operate in a way which is out of expected operating parameters. This happens with cars from other makers, but #2 and #3 clarify this. http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5gc_pIFqke7...

2) Toyota has known, very clearly about this problem for quite a while and has refused to address it. As far as the public knows, Toyota has done no engineering exercise to discover the nature of the flaw and has so far engaged in finger pointing. When Steve Wozniak found another, similar flaw in the brake system after doing a fairly extensive engineering review of his car, he was initially ignored, then met with surprise at such a wild discovery.

3) Similar problems have been found in other cars, even ones with a strong reputation for quality and reliability. Those makers responded almost immediately and took it seriously. The cat is out of the bag that Toyota was not taking it seriously, or rather that Toyota was calculating public safety vs. the cost of lawsuits. This speaks to a particularly broken internal corporate climate. Which is surprising to anyone who has studied Toyota's corporate management philosophy.

While two data point (mine and my father's) are rightly taken as anecdotal data, there are not, in any real sense that many more reported cases of car crashes -- yet we're all taking it very seriously. When does a collection of events become "statistical data"? My stats prof in uni said that statistics are simply a large collection of anecdotes. The number of people with reported unexpected acceleration problems is actually very small. What's the line that separates anecdotes from "vanishingly small percentage"?

I'd argue that the definition of this line is precisely the mental exercise that Toyota found itself caught up in when it was trying to decide to recall or wait for the law suits. In the end, the company erred on the side of ignoring statistically insignificant anecdotes to their peril.

It depends a lot on the positioning of the petals. There are some makes and models where it's rather easy to accidentally hit the wrong petal, is it's only an inch or so away from the right petal.

I tend to drive Toyotas, and their petal placement has not been problematic. My mom's Subaru makes it far easier to accidentally hit both petals, which I've managed to do once or twice.

If the placements of the accelerator and brakes are too close , then perhaps that too is an engineering challenge...perhaps more of a user interface one than a "does it work" problem. But an interesting engineering challenge nonetheless.

I've driven a few cars where I did notice the placement was a bit tight, but it just made me extra cautious. However, I could totally see accidentally hitting the wrong pedal if you wore the wrong shoes or panicked or something in those cars. I don't think the Toyota cars under discussion suffer from this design flaw.

One thing that's really interesting: this is impossible to do in a standard transmission (once you've been driving one for a while). The emergency procedure for a manual is to use the brake while putting the transmission in neutral, which will make the car stop forward acceleration no matter which pedal you had your foot on in the first place.

I've done that. I backed into the door frame of my parent's garage. My dad still doesn't believe I hit the wrong petal.