The Audi 5000 UA debacle brought us the Brake Transmission Shift Interlock or BTSI or bitsi as it is now called. Not long after the Audi UA there were a group of Jeep products. Long after bitsi became law, it was found that ergonomics and human error was the cause. The interlock just made our cars more idiot proof. Once you are out of park and driving, bitsi can't help you.

The location and shape of pedals plays a large role in human interactions and learned muscle memmory. Ergonomics is a big factor in human induced UA. This does not mean that these incidents are human induced. It just explains why one type of car may (or may not) be prone to higher levels of human induced UA.

So assuming that human error is a near constant. Pedal placement will skew the statistics.

The company I work for studies interactions and the human factors. Our complaints of UA are rare.

 

From what you are saying, as an example, a car that has the gas pedal and the brake pedal roughly on an equal plane, might be more prone to human error than one that has a higher placement for the brake pedal. Even though the "more equal" design might be easier to drive, it might create more human error UA? If the driver needs to lift the foot higher off the gas pedal to use the brake, that muscle memory gets learned. Hmmm. I'll have to have a look at my pedals in that respect, but I suspect Toyota has them in a similar plane.

Don't know about other makes of cars today, but I know that in the "old days" the pedals for brake and clutch were much higher than the gas pedal. Interesting theory! Thanks for sharing!

 

Posted elsewhere and copied here ...

I believe the number of complaints might paint a very unrealistic view of the issue.

Since the only stat we are aware of is the NHTSA complaint list, I think there's a few potential problems that can crop up...

• I know this is a massive generalization (and I could be wrong), but Toyota's are more popular on the coasts whereas Fords (for example) are more popular in the fly over states. Two different demographics. Is it possible that the type of person in Mass., DC, NY, LA, etc. might be more inclined to complain to NHTSA than someone in Missouri, Oklahoma, Kansas, Iowa or Ohio? There's a lot of lawyers in "Toyota country" and these might be the type of people who would be more likely to report problems.
  How many people (six months ago) would have known what NHTSA is and that they should report issues to the agency? I'll bet the number of people who know are significantly less than 1% of all drivers. This could drastically skew the numbers (This is similar to the story about a telephone poll conducted in the 1930's indicated the Republican would win the election.. he lost... most of the telephone owners back then were wealthier people and supported the Republican candidate)
  ...
• Is it possible that the early publicity from Toyota brought out more complaints? IIRC, they publicized their UA mat recall in 2007, might drivers of similar models said "hey, that happened to me, too!" and then reported their incident, whereas drivers of Brand X who had UA thought that maybe it was their fault or just sluffed it off and moved on? I believe the publicity of an incident pulls other incidences out of the woodwork.
• Here's one more "what if". Let's assume that the there are three separate causes of UA, that being mats, sticky pedals and electronic error. Now there's no way of knowing this, but is it possible that all manufacturers have an electronic error rate of .01%, a sticky pedal problem rate of 0.1% and finally, the mat issue, where Toyota suffers from a significantly higher rate of problems? Now, the current witch hunt mentality is lumping all three maladies together when in fact if they were able to be separated into the various components, the only problem that Toyota has would be the much publicized and already begun/completed mat recall?
• I did a quick search at NHTSA's site. For my car year (2008) there was one person who filed three separate complaints. Is that one 'incident' or three? If multiple complaints are received for the same car, might that not further skew the stats (assuming that one car got more 'multiple' complaints than the other?)

I'm not a statistician and all I have is a few newspaper articles and a healthy distrust for anyone throwing around statistics to prove a point ... but if my supposition is that UA can (and does) have many causes and affects more than one brand, can any or all of the above mentioned issues unfairly pose Toyota as the devil, when in fact they're suffering from a healthy degree of coincidences (with a small measure of vindictive political scapegoating thrown in for good measure)?

Who knows?