Say your accelerator jammed. Well, how long would it take you to figure this out and depress the clutch/put it into neutral? Especially an experienced driver like a highway patrolman. 5 seconds? Well, surely not long enough to make a 911 call.
Automatic, keyless ignition.
An auto box without a neutral position on the selector?
If your accelerator is jammed down and you declutch or put the car into neutral I guess the engine would blow up now that the load has been taken off it. It seems to me that the only sensible course of action is to switch it off.
Rob Graham
Darwinism in action. ignition off is first thing (I believe this was a keyless vehicle that required a 3 second press on the button to turn it off) If that cannot be done then neutral (it doesn't matter if the engine blows) Braking normally on a vehicle with a stuck throttle at speed will cook the brakes very quickly and they will then appear to not work (as in this case) but if it is in neutral the brakes will slow the car normally, if the throttle is wide open and it is in gear (particularly an auto) then a panic stop might do it, but a several hundred horsepower engine trying to move you forward with torque converter help would take some massive braking effort to overcome.
The advice given on the News last night ( speaking about the Toyota story) was to put car in neutral,brake normally ( no pumping of brake pedal) and steer to a safe place THEN switch off the ignition ....not to switch off before that as the power steering and braking ability would be affected .
exactly - modern petrol cars rev to the red line /maximum revs / (hits the limiter) and no more - I doubt whether it would "blow up"
Not on any engine made in the last 15 years, all diesels, everything with electronic fuel injection & quite a lot of cars before that have a rev limiter.
Indeed.
Don't know of any car which has such poor brakes. It would be positively dangerous.
Check Autocar's figures for braking versus acceleration. You won't find any car which can accelerate more quickly than it can brake - and that's through the gears, not in fifth.
Not on a modern car. They all have rev limiters built into the engine management. So should survive running at max revs for long enough to find a way of stopping it. Like the ignition switch. Diesels have always had rev limiters. But called governors in older times.
That's what I thought of at first but you'd lose power steering and servo-assisted braking.
ISTR reading that some keyless ignitions were "hard" to turn off whilst moving. You had the hold down the 'START' button for several seconds, or something. I can see someone not trying that whilst panicking.
As for neutral / braking? I don't know. I guess he was too busy praying for God to help him to bother to think for himself.
And? You can still steer and stop.
.. and when people simply panic?
It's entirely feasible that any car can be stopped easily, just as it's entirely feasible that not everybody has the presence of mind to work out what to do when it actually happens.
Servo assistance won't last long at wide open throttle whether the engine is running or not.
I think the brakes would have to be pretty good to stop a car in gear at full throttle from high speed. I can't say I have ever tried mind you.
Power steering would work fine with the car in gear engine on or off as long as its not a clever electrically powered system, and anyway, the steering would just go heavy, not immovable with a loss of power.
Dunno what the answer is.
I'm now informed that modern cars' engines won't go faster than a certain amount, so won't blow up. In which case, going into neutral would be fine.
A friend's wife was driving their 1985 Merc when the accelerator linkage popped off and she was left with a racing car. Although the vehicle was not exactly new, it was injection. But I don't know whether it was governed to a maximum speed. If I'd been driving it I'd have turned it off.
Rob
I can't help feeling that blowing up the engine in these circumstances would not be top of my list of worries. Serve the damn thing right!
Problem is that on some cars like the new Mini, manual steering is unfortunately a bit on the heavy side of heavy.
Eject a boat anchor out of the boot ...
Does such a beast exist? I *thought* that construction and use specifies that there must be a way to directly select neutral, even if you have flappy paddles.
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