A long time ago, near a teak forest in southwest China, lived an old man named Chan. He made his living by carving toys, statuettes and other tchotches out of the abundant teak wood. One day Chan awoke to discover that some of his carvings, which he left on display in front of his hut, were missing. He put out some new ones only to have them disappear as well. The only clue as to what happened was a track of small footprints, about the size a boy might make.
So Chan decided to sit up all night, to find out who was stealing his objets d'art. In the wee hours, by the light of the moon, he could see a bear -- a bear with very small feet (for a bear) -- making off with his goods. So he ran out of his house shouting, "Hey! Where you go, boyfoot bear with teaks of Chan?!"
I was thinking about that last week when I was driving a rented 2026 VW Jetta Sport. I am a boyfoot bore, and found that the pedals on the Jetta (pictured below) were much larger than necessary to accommodate my small (size 7) feet, noticeably smaller than those on my 10-year-old Korean car.
I asked myself, "Self, how come is it that brake and accelerator pedals suddenly got back to 1960s size?" Then I remembered something I read in P.J. O'Rourke's Parliament of Whores. Here's a slightly edited version of what Mr O'Rourke -- a great car enthusiast and writer -- said.
For 20 years the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has been getting complaints about "unintended acceleration" or "runaway car syndrome". People claim that their automobiles take off at high speed for no reason. Usually this happens when the gearshift selector is being moved from P to D or R. The drivers swear that they didn't have their feet on the gas and often swear that they were pressing on the brake as hard as they could.
These alarming episodes of mechanical self-will are officially known as sudden-acceleration incidents. By 1987, 6000 SAIs had been reported, supposedly causing 3000 accidents, 2000 injuries and 56 deaths.
There was a great outcry in consumerism circles. Demands were made for the government to put a stop, as it were, to this.
In the twinkling of an eye (by the standards of bureaucratic time, which is slower than geologic time but more expensive than time spent with Madame Claude's girls in Paris) the thing was done.
On 7 March 1989, the DOT-NHTSA produced an 81-page report written by an eight-man group of engineering savants with more than 50 years of college among them. This document presented evidence from exhaustive experiment and analysis that proved what everybody who understands how to open the hood of a car had known all along about SAIs: "Pedal misapplications are the likely cause of these incidents."
Yes, the truth was out at last! The dumb buggers stepped on the gas instead of the brake. The report shed some dim light on how this could happen, especially cases involving the Audi 5000, which was the favourite target of the Liability Lawyer Bottom-Feeder Association.
Audi had the bad luck to be designed with its brake and accelerator pedals close together (where, for the sake of quick stopping, they belong) instead of in separate counties, as they are in typical American luxury cars.
Thus Audi got a large number of plush-bottom yoohoos suffering from daytime-television brain buying the 5000. These people had never driven a European car before and were too busy attaching Garfield suction-cup toys to the rear window to watch what their feet were doing.
Santa Barrazza! Mr O'Rourke put his finger [his toe, surely. Ed.] on the underlying problem -- the large and growing difference in size between Europeans and North Americans. Cars like the Buick, in which the brake pedal is separated by at least a foot from the accelerator, are designed for people with big, fat feet.
My 1963 Plymouth Savoy (the best car I ever had) had a brake pedal which was, I swear, a foot wide. This was a problem because, in the absence of a clutch, there was a great temptation to rest one's left foot on the brake, giving rise to a conflict between accelerator and brake which, fortunately, the brake usually won.
There is an obvious fix for the big-feet-small-pedals problem, and I was surprised, while driving the VW, to discover that European car makers (or Volkswagen at least) have figured it out at last. North Americans are not going to get smaller, so the solution is to make the pedals bigger and separated by more space, as in the picture.
And what's that huge pedal on the left? Is it a clutch? Nooooo. The Jetta is an eight-speed automatic (note: not a CVT). What looks like a pedal is a really a "dead pedal" a plate fixed to the floor to give you a place to rest your big fat foot! Problem solved!
Further reading: "Lard butts more likely to die in car crashes than non-Americans", WWW 30/10/14.
