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Comment by gunnarmorling | Hacker News Reader

> Luckily [the accelerator servo] is also the only actuator that doesn’t come with major safety implications

This is giving me chills, what if that RC servo gets "stuck" at full throttle? I suppose the assumption is you could hit the clutch, but depending on the specific situation there might not be a lot of time for realizing what's happening and reacting accordingly.

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Wasn't that the supposed cause of all those Toyota crashes a few years back? People claimed the accelerator was stuck on full, and pressing the brakes did nothing, but the actual cause was people panicking and slamming on the accelerator instead of the brakes?

That and improperly sized or installed floormats catching the pedals. There are many examples of people hitting the gas instead of brake, freaking out, and hitting it even harder on the IdiotsInCars subreddit. Here's one:

https://www.reddit.com/r/IdiotsInCars/comments/xj8540/they_u...

As discussed in that thread, apparently this mostly happens to “2-foot drivers,” people who use one foot for the gas and one for the brakes. When in a state of panic or surprise, they can accidentally mix up which foot they need to stomp down on and end up slamming down the accelerator instead of the brakes.

I know some countries have very....."easy going" attitude to drivers ed, but surely.....especially if most of your vehicles are automatic.....you must have been told that your left foot never leaves the floor or you're going to seriously hurt yourself, right???

I and everyone I know around my age was taught to only use the right foot for both brake and gas, but apparently it was relatively common in the 1960s or so for drivers (at least of automatic transmissions) to be taught the 2-foot "method". I have nothing to back that up other than anecdotes on the Internet, though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudden_unintended_acceleration

One outcome of this is that driver floor-mats are no longer free-floating; they clip in to the floor, so they don't shift.

A car's brakes are required to be able to overpower the engine at full throttle.

Despite not being mentioned directly, the car is almost certainly manual so in case something like that happens, you can just shift to neutral (or even just press the clutch)

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