It's easy to blame the driver, but I still have a hard time doing so. Unfortunately for me it's far too easy to imagine myself in his shoes.
I take time to learn controls when I get into unfamiliar vehicles. I adjust seats, steering and mirrors, I find out where the lights and wipers are, and I figure out the shifter. But I don't take the floormats out unless they capture my attention in some way. (It has happened.) And I don't think I would have ever gone as far as to check how to shut the car off in a panic situation, no matter what kind of starting arrangement it had. It never entered my mind to do so. I will now, after this.
But the driver of that Lexus does not have the luxury of hindsight.
There are a great many ways to cause a throttle to stick. I once had an MGB throttle cable stick wide open because the plastic liner inside the housing had melted; it turns out that the grounding cable to the engine block had broken, and the current flow of the entire electrical system was routing through the throttle cable! With today's drive-by-wire systems that won't happen, but plenty of other things might.
The problem I see here isn't that the floor mat caused the throttle to stick. It is that the driver, once he became aware that the throttle was stuck, was still unable to regain control of the vehicle, or at least disable it. He didn't panic, and yet he failed to either shut the car off or get it into neutral. That's what killed him.
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Originally Posted by jamesqf
The flip side of that is that important controls should always be in the same place, and work much the same way, in any car. Toyota decided to break this rule with their ignition switch, and we see the result.
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Keyless ignition is not the sole realm of Lexus. It's gaining popularity across the marketplace. But I agree otherwise.
If not in the same place, at least we should expect that critical functionality be intuitive in some way. For example a start/stop pushbutton with a "panic" mode activated by pushing the button
harder than usual, rather than
longer. Or perhaps a kill switch on the steering column in the place once occupied by the ignition key.
Shift levers are going away too, being replaced by steering wheel paddles and whatnot. There needs to be similar thought given to an intuitive means of getting into neutral.