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> Consumer cars & SUVs can go 0-60 in under 10 seconds in almost all cases, and the fact that the brake can overcome that acceleration is great, except it takes time

The actual data paints a different picture: http://media.caranddriver.com/images/media/51/braking-result...

That said people don't do well with surprises so while the car mechanically would have no trouble at all stopping very nearly as fast due to a wide open throttle, the driver is probably freaking out instead of just slamming on the brakes.

Also people suck at actually slamming on the brakes, regardless of the situation. It's not something people want to ever do. They'll hit the brakes, they just won't go anywhere close to really pushing that pedal to the floor.



I'd wager that a large proportion of elderly drivers lack the strength to make a full brake application.


> The actual data paints a different picture

To what? That doesn't contradict what I said at all.


All the cars added a marginal [ O(10ft) ] amount of braking distance at wide open throttle; with the exception of a very powerful, heavily tuned sports car which was the only one able to overwhelm its brakes.

If we convert MPH to FPS we can look at the data as follows:

70 MPH: 102.667 fps 100 MPH: 146.667 fps

    CAMRY, V6,  70-0: delta 16 feet,  .15sec
    CAMRY, V6, 100-0: delta 88 feet,  .60sec

    INFINITY  70-0: delta  9 feet, .08sec  
    INFINITY 100-0: delta  6 feet, .04sec
We're talking tenths or hundredths of a second of unintended acceleration. A cursory search tells me reaction time to visual stimuli is about ~250ms.[1][2]

This means that in all but the Camry 100-0 case your reaction time is a larger factor in braking distance than the presence of wide open throttle.

[1]: http://www.humanbenchmark.com/tests/reactiontime/statistics

[2]: http://www.jneurosci.org/content/26/15/3981.full.pdf




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