NY Times 3/10/10 Op Ed on Driver Error and SUA

Braking Bad

by R. Schmidt
U Ca. psychologist who worked on the Audi deal in the 80's for Audi


His theory is basically human error in pushing the pedals.

He says that in the 80's all the SUA cars he investigated were automatic transmission. He says it's harder to screw this up in a manual transmission car.

Quote about who was involved in SUA incidents:
"We noticed that the complaints were far more frequent among older drivers (in a General Motors study, 60-to-70-year-olds had about six times the rate of complaints as 20-to-30-year-olds), drivers who had little experience with the specific car involved (parking-lot attendants, car-wash workers, rental-car patrons) and people of relatively short stature. "

Quote about the mechanism for first making the mistake of pressing the gas instead of the brake, and second keeping on doing it for several seconds until you crash:
"First, in these situations, the driver does not really confuse the accelerator and the brake. Rather, the limbs do not do exactly what the brain tells them to. Noisy neuromuscular processes intervene to make the action slightly different from the one intended. The driver intends to press the brake, but once in a while these neuromuscular processes cause the foot to deviate from the intended trajectory — just as a basketball player who makes 90 percent of his free throws sometimes misses the hoop. This effect would be enhanced by the driver being slightly misaligned in the seat when he first gets in the car.
The answer to the second question is that, when a car accelerates unexpectedly, the driver often panics, and just presses the brake harder and harder. Drivers typically do not shut off the ignition, shift to neutral or apply the parking brake. "

As with all the other articles posted here, this does not PROVE the hypothesis that pedal errors are the sole cause of this stuff.

But it does present a coherent theory as to how pedal errors might result in this problem, and why you aren't just an idiot if you make a pedal error and don't immediately correct it.

It talks about the remedies Audi invented, how they helped (somewhat) and how the brake override fix will also help (but again will not cure the whole problem).