Last night while I was parallel parking manually the car sped forward crashing into the car ahead and careening into a tree. I had no control of the acceleration. How is this possible with the safety systems? Scariest car event I’ve ever experienced. Thoughts???
car is a 2023 S500 having just been serviced for new tires and routine maintenance.

 

I understand you may not have realized what happened, but you mistook the gas for the brake. Every case of "unintended acceleration" that has ever been investigated by the NHTSA has come to that conclusion. For one, even with full throttle with your foot on the brake the car cannot overpower the brakes. So, if your foot had been hard on the brakes you wouldn't have been going anywhere...it was hard on the gas.

I was a passenger in a car where the driver did this and its very scary, its an easier mistake to make than you would think.

 

And emergency braking/accident avoidance may not be able to react fast enough, or may not be active at parking speeds and large steering wheel angles.

 

Every mechanical system has the capacity to fail catastrophically.
Some mechanisms, some hardware, or some software could have experienced some glitch or error.
Some of the same systems that would for instance cause an over speed of the engine and transmission, could also incapacitate the braking system.
The problem is, unless any of that can be confirmed, or documented, the fault will fall on the operator.
I am not saying categorically that it was some sort of non human cause, just like no one could, without evidence, categorically blame the human operator.
After decades of driving, confusing the gas pedal, and the brake pedal has never happened to me to cause an accident.
For me to be convinced that this was caused by the driver, it would have to be demonstrated that the driver was substandard in many ways.

 

Like I said before. That argument has been made over and over and every time it’s found to have been driver error.

It’s easier to do than you would think, people get confused or their feet slip and it’s hard on the gas vs the brake. All happens in a split second. The person I was riding with it happened to had been driving for 40 years. Happened in CA to a CA state trooper wits lots of advanced driver training. He and his whole family died when he could have just put the car in neutral or stood on the brake. Cause? Accelerator was pinned under the floormat.

 

I would tend to disagree with those blaming the driver...except I had a close call with my CLS: The brake and gas pedals are close and I was wearing winter boots. I applied the brakes but the car started to accelerate. Fortunately I realized my foot was too far to the right on the brake pedal so I was simultaneously pressing on the gas pedal. No cars in front so no accident. But could have been one.

 

Exactly…

 

Even Mbenz’s general counsel would be ashamed to first blame the driver before even offering an apology to the owner for experiencing such a devastating experience. This is really worth investigating by Mbenz if true. Sudden acceleration is NOT common, but I can tell you with full confidence that Mbenz losing the accelerator singal completely is a very well documented/confirmed issue that embarrassed Mbenz for so many years and from my experience, have not yet been solved until today the right way.

OP: This is terrible but am glad everyone is safe.

We have had similar experience with our GLS but the complete opposite. The accelerator lost 100% of it’s signal right before an intersection. Now I don’t want someone to tell me oh it was the brake or whatever..lol… cause it wasn’t in that case obviously. The event lasted 20-30 seconds, all while the engine is idling firm and all recorded on our dash videocam with cabin sound… Luckily we were able to make it to the other side (car momentum rolling), all while the car was 100% running and engine idling.. just no accelerator response whatsoever as of the engine is off but not. Once the car arrived the other side of the intersection with emergency/hazard indicators on, turned off the car, turned on again, and things are back to normal. Dashcam was very handy. We took it to the dealer, shared all videos, and they could not figure out at all what is going on (oh we couldn’t duplicate it …we updated the software… oh sure!). I posted about it in the GLS forum. And for the record, there are dozen of reported issues of the same, some experiencing it on the highway!.

 

The concept of cars being able to take off on their own has just been debunked so many times, the simplest most common sense explanation is that it was driver error.

 

Thank you for a sane, reasoned, documented reply.
Your experience, though legitimate, will be dismissed as anecdotal, or some such misdirection.
It is very evident that there are those who will ignore all evidence to the contrary, or reasonable consideration of logical inference.
I don’t know why, except that humans have the ability to be very contradictory, and like my Grandmother would say, “A man convinced against his will, is of the same opinion still”.
I guess will and pride go together like peas and carrots, as Forrest Gump would say.

 

Unintended acceleration is theoretically possible. In modern cars there's no longer a direct connection from the throttle pedal to the engine. It's all throttle-by-wire, so in theory the ECU could receive an incorrect signal making it think the driver wants to accelerate. Sensors in the pedal can fail etc. There's been a failsafe for a while, though, for this. When standing on the brakes, the throttle signal is cut. You can't accelerate and brake at the same time in modern cars. Some let you rev a bit with the foot on the brakes, but WOT isn't possible. Again, though, this requires sensors to work so the car detects that you are standing on the brakes.

So without reading out the signals and do a forensic analysis of what exactly happened at the time, blame shouldn't be assigned either way. But human error is more likely in these scenarios than machine error. I've had floormats slip on me in the past, pinning a pedal and depending on the shoes I wear I've caught pedals with the edge of the sole. In my case it tends to be that I catch the brake pedal when stepping on the accelerator and ending up lurching. With the floor hinged accelerator pedal, the floormat can very easily press on the accelerator pedal if it comes loose and slips forward. Just something to keep an eye on.

Shoes are important when driving, too. These days I wear Piloti driving shoes. I've had too many cases of discomfort in my feat from regular shoes while driving, or as said, accidentally caught the brake pedal, because the sole is too wide.

 

What evidence is there that we are ignoring? Its fact that every time this has been investigated it has been found to be driver error. What is more likely, that this is the one time it hasn't been or that it is also driver error?

Having the throttle not respond at all is totally different than having it transmit WOT with no such input. Even if it did that though applying the brake would stop the car. So in order for this to be caused by the car not from driver error the car would have to transmit full throttle AND ignore the braking input...So...incredibly unlikely.

Go out to your car, put your foot to the floor on the accelerator and also hold onto the brake. Report back what happens.

 

"Thoughts???"

you're gonna have to give more details than this before people can offer any further that's on your particular vehicle without any forensic assessment of the vehicle data

when the car accelerated forward, was it in drive?

what is it about the situation that led you to believe you had no control over the acceleration?

When the car accelerated forward, what angle was the steering wheel at?

When the car accelerated forward, were you already ready to finalize the parallel parking presumably wouldn't there be another car in front of you? You said that there was a tree that it ran into?

Do you have any floor mats in the car?

Are these aftermarket floor mats?

Go through the entire maneuver of the parallel parking process on this particular day and discuss when in this process it started accelerating out of control, what were your feet doing, what were your hands doing?

How old are you? How are you feeling that day? Are you in any new medication's? Were you in an argument with someone? Was there something emotionally challenging about that moment itself beyond the parallel parking? Was there anything distracting?

i'm not trying to discriminate against you in anyway I'm just trying to bring light to the fact that we have to consider what was going on with the driver at that time, and the driver's primarily, and usually 100% of the time, the reason the car does what the car is supposed to do based on the input from the driver

you have seven posts on this forum since 2023, I wonder if you do in fact, come back to post on this thread, will you answer all of the questions in my post here? Or is this rant and run?

 

Suggest you not do this with the car in the garage and the door closed......

 

I would suggest a wide open parking lot lol

 

If OP has enough evidence or suspicion that there was a malfunction, all they have to do is get the Event Data Recorder (EDR) read out. Nobody here will be able to say what happened, other than what likely happened. Be prepared for some uncomfortable news.

 

All you have to do to see how common this actually is is to look at how many stories there are where people trying to park have just accelerated into businesses and homes.


Right down the street from me:



Give it a Google, happens all the time.

 

This happened to my mother-in-law when she was leaving her nursing shift and she was in a brand new 2008 Infiniti G 35X, she claimed the car accelerated out of control into her actual nursing home where she actually was on staff. She was just leaving her shift. She drove the car into the actual building itself and thank God there was no patient in the room that she drove into.

She blamed the vehicle, it was evaluated by the body shop and Infiniti and it turns out that she had extra winter mats on the floor, and these must've impacted the accelerator as she went for the brake panel also has a brand new car for her and she didn't realize which one was which. But to this day, she made things that it was the vehicles fault.

she got the car back from the body shop - essentially their repaired front and damage, but the car itself was very drivable, and there was nothing catastrophic. They didn't do any modification to the brake system or the acceleration system, and the car for the next 10 years until they got rid of it never misbehaved in anyway.

I learned something important, nobody wants to admit that they drove into a building accidentally. Nobody wants to be that person. And I bet nobody wants to be the owner of a relatively new S class that accelerated into a tree. Nobody wants to be that guy. Cognitive dissonance.

Malcolm Gladwell took a look at the 2009 issue with Toyota and those brake pedals, were the drivers to blame or was it the car to blame?


https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/revi...ory/blame-game

 

Some of us wish that was our mother-in-law.

 

my mother-in-law has the most cognitive dissonance of any human I know. 😂

 

Yep, and honestly they may just not even remember or realize what they did. Theres a reason why these things often happen during high stress maneuvers like parking, parallel parking, etc. The one I was involved in the driver was in his 60s, so not elderly by any means but older, and he was backing up with his torso turned around so he could look straight out the rear window (no backup cameras etc back then) and he jammed the gas instead of the brake backwards. Very scary,

 

60 Minutes almost singlehandedly tanked Audi in the US over this issue with the 5000. Look it up....

 

Don’t forget to read the comments. They are incisive, and quite humorous.

 

Yup! And in the end it was drivers stabbing the gas instead of the brakes.

 

I remember this unfortunate incident with the trooper and his family. It was at the height of the Lexus unintended acceleration controversy. Car and Driver did a test during this time where they took 2 cars (I think they were a Taurus and a Camry) and under full throttle with the accelerator floored they stood on the brakes and in both cases the brakes overpowered the engines. I believe they reported that the stopping distances weren't much longer than with their normal testing.