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Comment by MR4D | Hacker News Reader

Now I want one of those for my car!

If you car has an Eco or Power or Sport mode this is probably what it does. On my Toyota, Power mode makes the accelerator more sensitive and Eco mode makes it less sensitive (which is great for snow). Flooring it is the same, regardless of the mode.

You can't even rely on this, on my car the default behaviour is that the middle of the accelerator pedals range of motion is the "sweet spot", and in fact flooring it will trigger the hill climb assist and cause the automatic transmission to go down a gear.

Typically there is extra resistance at the downshift position, and you already have full throttle in the current gear before engaging it.

I haven't owned a car with them, but I thought those modes were to control when the gear shifts happen. Sport will optimize acceleration while eco will change up sooner to save fuel

I hope Sport mode changes both rpm limit and pedal response.

My car has them, but it is a hybrid with planetary gear, so would not make sense for it.

Haha, probably we want a hinge on the joint between the gas pedal and the curved pin thing it pushes down? And move the pedal back or forward? Or yeah, I love to be super ignorant of the classical Simple Machines and try to work out mechanics like this.

I’ve actually had some success with guess-prototyping mechanical contraptions in the physics-sandbox game Besiege: https://www.spiderlinggames.com/

I can also emphatically recommend just getting a Husaberg 550, 570, or 650 %D

These days you muck with the pedal position to throttle mapping, no need to change the mechanism itself.

If your car has electronic throttle the engineers (with tons of input from the fuel economy people) have already decided for you.

If it doesn't then the linkage is already designed to be non-linear by adjusting the arc of the pedal linkage vs the throttle linkage.

These exist for most modern cars, you can buy a plug in box that remaps the throttle curve.

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