In my car from the mid 90s' the solution to a stuck accelerator is pretty trivial.
You can physically shift the transmission, which is a mechanical connection, into neutral. Worst case you can turn the key which electrically disconnects the ignition. And stuck accelerators were rarely a problem because the throttle was a physical cable.
We probably had a couple of seconds before multiple people were gonna be dead-dead.
People don’t always think, or act, in the most sensible way in an emergency. In this case, the driver overshot neutral and threw the vehicle into reverse. We spun out and needed up in the ditch.
FWIW my 3-pedal daily driver is impervious to this failure mode. If the engine starts doing anything I don't expect my instinctive reaction is to push in the clutch pedal, which I am always prepared to do in a split second because I keep my left foot resting lightly on it. In the extremely unlikely situation where the clutch pedal also doesn't work I can still yank the shifter into neutral. The only way to get to get it into reverse is to pull up on a collar on the shaft of the stick and then shift into the "first gear" position, which I'm definitely not going to do while panicking.
It doesn't matter how trivial it is to override a stuck pedal, it's still a serious hazard, because even if you have the option to shift into neutral a driver may not think of that or may not react in time.
It's also trivial to override it in the Cybertruck: just press the brake pedal. Braking is hard-coded to cut off the accelerator, so if both pedals are pressed the brake wins and the accelerator is ignored. Still a big problem though.
Our current vehicles are a manual transmission Civic and a PHEV Pacifica. The Civic is easy—just press in the clutch—but the Pacifica would be more tricky; I guess I'd start with the brakes, then the shifter (which is just an input to the computer, of course), then hold down the power button, and then look for a place to ditch.
on APCI computers, the power button is software-controlled, i.e. it sends a signal to the OS, if the OS is currently frozen (or is configured to ignore it), pressing the power button does nothing. But to override this, if you hold it for about four seconds, a hardware shutdown still happens (is it done by the motherboard?). There are also other functions, like holding the power button for 30 seconds to enter into recovery mode on iPhones.
I wonder if holding the power button on a running EV car does anything similar...
- it’s not something that happens regularly so drivers are not prepared for it
- it can cause disaster in literal seconds (or even a single second)
It doesn’t matter how easy it is to mitigate if there is going to be a delay in most drivers deploying that mitigation.
The problem is that by the time you've reacted to the sudden unexpected acceleration and found a way to get the vehicle to stop, you may have already crashed or run something over or something. This is true on your car with a physical transmission as well.
This is all assuming that the brake overrides the accelerator (which it really really should, especially on an electric car where it's all computerized).
I think you mean an automatic physical transmission. My manual transmission car has a clutch that I can always disengage in a fraction of a second.