Runaway Cars: Driver Error Or Car Malfunction?

In the mid-1980s the car company Audi had a problem. Some customers were reporting a mysterious defect in the Audi 5000. Their cars, they said, were uncontrollably surging forward. There had been accidents. Deaths.

Audi denied the cars were the issue, and so the U.S. government undertook an enormous study of sudden acceleration.

Joan Claybrook, the former head of the advocacy group Public Citizen, says that when this report on sudden acceleration finally came out in 1989, its conclusions were unwavering: The problem was driver error. People, not cars, were to blame.

And so for 30 years, Claybrook says, whenever potential cases of sudden acceleration came up they were mostly — and in her view tragically — dismissed. It was just assumed that the person had panicked and pressed the wrong pedal.

Then came Mark Saylor.

Mark Saylor was an off-duty police officer who experienced a deadly episode of sudden acceleration while driving north on Highway 125 in California with his wife, child and brother-in-law. The brother-in-law called 911 and reported their situation. The call was recorded and, after Saylor and his family were killed, released to the public.

All across America, people listened to this call of Saylor and his family speeding to their deaths and instantly changed their view of driver error. Saylor was clearly calm enough to make a phone call and explain his problem.

And so the narrative changed overnight: Now cars, not people, were to blame. That was the story in hearing rooms of Congress, on the 24-hour cable networks and the headline in the papers.

But some experts say that though there may in fact be real defects in Toyotas and other cars, it's likely that at least some of the episodes of sudden acceleration that have made the news recently are the product of human error.

According to the research, they say, human beings have a long history of pushing the wrong pedal.


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