Left-foot braking: how not to do it, and what to do when it all goes totally ‘Skynet’ down there. I hate when that happens…

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Imagine you’re driving along and five years down the track some dodgy floor mat shifts forward unexpectedly and it wedges the accelerator flat down on the floor. It could be a drink bottle, or an adult toy, or your Louis Vuitton yachting moccasins - whatever, the point is, it gets stuck and jams the loud pedal down.

Or, hypothetically, you might have complete brain-fade during some critical driving incident, and you jam both pedals flat to the floor instead of just the brake (because high-level cognitive abilities are extremely degraded in a crisis).

Which is why you need advanced driver training if you want to swerve, avoid and (importantly) recover control in a driving crisis. Expecting to be Batman (or Lewis Hamilton) in this situation, without putting in the work, is nuts.

The point is: the throttle and the brake don’t go together. Because they do opposite things. And if you do call on them both contemporaneously, the car should identify that you are being something of a dick, and intervene.

In such a situation (I’m told) it does make sense to interlock the throttle against brake input. Most cars have throttle-by-wire, so it’s easy to kill the throttle via ECU intervention. It’s just a few lines of code.

Teaching your kids how to drive? Re-teaching yourself perhaps? Here’s my comprehensive advice on survival driving:

Safe Driving Part 1: Top 5 Rules >> and the all-important follow-through, Safe Driving Part 2: Skills vs Tactics >>

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