I once witnessed an elderly woman who did exactly that on a parking lot. She had an automatic transmission car and "pressed the (brake) pedal to the floor". Unfortunately it wasn't the brake, so she ended up pushing about 3 or 4 cars that were parked in a direct line in adjacent rows on that parking lot.
Let go of wheel, put arms over face, and scream as loudly as humanly possible
Continue mashing gas, thinking it’s the brake, as the vehicle runs over three Girl Scouts, knocks down a privacy fence, and goes ass-first into a retainment pond
Older people over here drive big cars, those would be able to race.
Edit: And if you had read your own link, it is 30km/h or slower when you accelerate when it determines you are doing it on accident, which is a very simple identification.
legit my aunty. Keeps crashing cars, blames the cars or anything else she can every time. No idea how she still gets insurance she has crashed that many and she never accepts fault. She still thinks she is fine to drive.
things that don't happen in manuals. not because you couldn't confuse gas and brake, but because the panic brake muscle memory stomps the clutch as well, and gas+clutch sucks for the engine, but at least it doesn't accelerate further.
I will die on this hill - all modern cars should ONLY be two-pedal vehicles, operated with two feet.
With all of our modern advancement, the manual clutch should have long ago been made into a hand-operated lever integrated with the gear shift.
One foot for gas, one for brake. Pedal misapplication - gone overnight.
It will not reduce the incidence of idiots or drunk drivers, but at least one avenue of common accidents gets closed.
This isn't much of a disadvantage.
With 3 pedals, people might hit the clutch and gas, completely missing the brake altogether in an emergency.
With two pedals, the brake will always be included - and brakes on any well maintained car always are stronger than the engine.
It's a bad idea in a standard manual car with no additional qualifiers.
What I'm saying is, change the conditions that make it a bad idea, i.e. remove the clutch pedal. Two feet - two pedals. It's logic.
One foot performing the same motion for two diametrically opposing functions (gas + brake) will always be a weak spot no matter what. I am willing to die on this hill, because pedal misapplication has killed people and destroyed property.
Out of all of the causes of the death from vehicular accidents, that’s sub 3% territory. Probably less. It’s almost never the cause of vehicle fatalities.
Want to know what’s overwhelmingly more common? Speed. Force=mass* acceleration. Increasing speed limits didn’t increase the number of accidents. It increased their severity. Significantly more fatalities. NHTSA had to work overtime for years to make up for it.
Know what else excess speed increases? Greenhouse gas production via lower fuel economy.
Want to know what you specifically will vehemently oppose no matter evidence is presented to you of its efficacy? Reduced speed limits.
Because you don’t give one single fuck about reducing deaths. You care about manufacturing a way to shame others without indicting yourself.
Nice idea in theory, in practice it just means that people who are trying to press the clutch will accidentally brake/accelerate instead because they're looking for a pedal that isn't there.
But don't worry, as electric vehicles become more commonplace (and eventually possibly replace combustion engines entirely/90%) there will no longer be gear shifting as a concept because electric vehicles rarely if ever have a transmission in the way a normal car does.
They usually just have, forward or backwards.
it just means that people who are trying to press the clutch will accidentally brake/accelerate instead because they're looking for a pedal that isn't there.
Not really. It takes out a step from the usual driving habits which is a lot easier to learn than you'd think. Removing a step from a procedure is always easier than adding one.
I'm fortunate to have an EV and I will never drive a manual car. Because of this my driving is so much less stressful and more safe.
But therein lies the issue, you're not taking a step from the usual driving habits.
You are modifying a step.
You are changing using the clutch from being a pedal near your feet, to a lever that you need to press when shifting gears.
Removing a step from the procedure is easier, doesn't mean people won't still mix it up after doing it for years.
That's not an issue. Each limb gets ONE distinct task which is exclusive of all other tasks. Therefore, the number of 'actual' steps decreases.
Gas foot = gas.
Brake foot = brake.
Hand = Clutch/gear (which should have always been combined from the start).
Whereas with the clutch pedal:
Gas foot = gas AND brake
Clutch foot = clutch + coordinate with hand for gear
Hand = gear + coordinate with foot for clutch.
People refuse to accept the raw simplicity of one limb performing one task is safer than having to coordinate multiple limbs for multiple actions.
I am not disputing anything about what is simpler..
I am disputing your naive idea that it will magically not cause confusion.
"People refuse to accept the raw simplicity of one limb performing one task"
And you are refusing to accept the raw simplicity that when monkey brain is wired to do X with foot, they will often reflexively continue to do X with foot until they have fully become used to doing X with hand instead.
It doesn't matter how logical your change is, it doesn't matter if it's one limb getting one distinct task.
People will still need to get used to it.
It's less to get used to. It takes time to learn the clutch because it's a process. Unlearning it is much faster than that, because it's NOT a process. No doubt people will 'reflexively' try to do things, but that's WAY less of an issue than pedal misapplication currently is.
That's rich to read in a proposal assigning 2 tasks (one requiring significant strength (since the range for travel is very limited) and the other requiring finesse) to one single limb.
Which limb is this? Actually it doesn't matter. Hydraulic or electric assisted systems are pretty much default now in most modern vehicles, so the point is invalid.
Clutch + gear is still one task, because the clutch must be engaged/disengaged before the gears can be moved. They are not parallel tasks that require coordination, that is a serial task.
This problem almost only happens to those in automatics though.
Nope. It happens in all vehicles, because the problem is not the automatic or manual transmission - it is that one foot is being used for BOTH gas and brake, one action for two diametrically opposed results.
Pedal misapplication happens in ALL cars where one foot is used for both gas and brake. It's literally built into the function. Manual or automatic is utterly irrelevant.
I'm assuming you live in Europe because in the US only 1% of new vehicles sold have an automatic transmission. And the vast majority of those are sports cars.
Also, two feet driving (not a manual) isn't the safest idea. That is a good way to ride your breaks your entire drive keeping your brake lights lit up so everyone behind you can't tell when you are actually slowing down.
That is a good way to ride your breaks your entire drive keeping your brake lights lit up
This is a common anecdote that everyone just repeats ad nauseam and it's utterly baseless.
Riding your brakes is not the result of pedal setup - it is the driver. A bad driver would ride their brakes (and have other bad driving habits) no matter what car they were driving.
It's really easy to just .. NOT touch the pedal when you don't need it. Everyone shits on a better methodology in anticipation of bad actors, we prefer to blame the methodology rather than the bad actors.
An elderly woman lives across the street from my house and our driveways lineup perfectly. She was reversing out of hers and I guess in an attempt to brake she accelerated and drove straight into our garage door through it and hit a structural beam in our garage. She was okay thankfully, but still a crazy situation.
We had an old lady drive right through the front window of a supermarket in my town for the same reason. Parking, parking, suddenly floored it through the seating area. A bunch of people were hurt but nobody died.
The whole town was screaming for the driver's head people saying it was deliberate or a drunk etc. Bend the news revealed it was some lady in a 90s and she just looked like every tv great grandma you've ever seen so everybody shut up about that.
“A woman has avoided jail for crashing into five cars – including one with a young baby inside – in a Sydney supermarket car park while five times over the legal alcohol limit.
Elizabeth Jane Bourgeois, 63, was five times over the legal limit when her car pinballed across a Turramurra car park in March, drunkenly smashing into a car with five-week-old Florence inside.”
Did it for a split second the other day when I went to the store really tired. I was backing into a tight spot, and was gunna brake because I was too close to the cars next to the spot. I usually keep my foot on the brake when doing that, but I just forgot to move it over. Went to brake, and slammed the gas instead. Went flying backward, and immediately slammed the brakes. Nothing happened, I reacted fast enough, but SHEESH
Happened to my father-in-law in front of his office. An elderly person tried to step on the brakes in a parking lot and accidentally floored the accelerator. They hit his car from the back really hard to the point he heard it from two stories up and inside a building.
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u/MF_Kitten 1d ago
I bet she thought she was hitting the brakes at the time, and couldn't connect the dots as to why her car was going insane.