Scorn may be a strong word, but the reality of the situation is that a driver faced with an unintended acceleration incident can avoid disaster by applying the

Scorn may be a strong word, but the reality of the situation is that a driver faced with an unintended acceleration incident can avoid disaster by applying the brake and/or putting the car in neutral. No Toyota's engine is strong enough to keep the car moving with the driver mashing the brake with all of his or her might. Previous incidents of unintended acceleration such as the infamous Audi 5000 were usually found to be caused by the driver flooring the accelerator while thinking they had their foot on the brake. The problem comes because when your car starts doing something completely unexpected and terrifying, most people panic, so if your gas pedal gets caught on the floormat, you won't have the presence of mind to go through a mental checklist of things you can do to stop the car. My guess is that to the extent that floormat problems caused gas pedals to stick, for 99% of the drivers, they hit the brake and kicked the gas pedal free and they were fine. But 1% of the people, in their panic, hit the gas by accident or just freaked out and froze, and crashed their cars. Now, since it appears that Toyota tried to cover up the fact that there was a legitimate engineering or design problem at play, then they probably deserve the fine. Even if panic and driver error contributed to each and every incident, it doesn't mean that Toyota wasn't responsible for creating a situation wherein a driver had to cope with a terrifying, unexpected car malfunction. What this whole incident proves to me is that we're very cavalier about the dangers of having millions of poorly-trained, distracted operators of powerful machines zipping all over the streets of our planet. Self-driving cars can't come soon enough.