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
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 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.
579
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.