Sudden acceleration is more likely to result in a (deadly?) crash for drivers with little experience. Young, especially teen-age, drivers have little experience.
Young drivers kill and injure far more people than elderly drivers.
I actually almost included inexperience in my comment, but I thought it muddled the point since this article is asking why the elderly are over-represented in the toyota acceleration related deaths.
It seems like you're correcting me, but how is your point anything but tangential? If you're wondering why inexperienced drivers aren't also over-represented, it's probably because not many 16-21 year olds drive priuses.
Ignoring that young people live through stuff better. And ignoring that the comment I was replying to merely said that young people account for more injuries, not more often, much less more per mile.
If I got plenty of experience noticing I have no breaks in situations where I really needed them ... does that count?
(drove a piece of shit of a car for quite some time)
I also ended up in situations where my instinct or experience told me to accelerate instead of pushing the breaks. This happens often.
Got plenty of experience driving on glazed frost. I even crashed once because of the car skidding ... went off-road, with the car rolling over a couple of times, and me and the other passenger survived with minor injuries.
From that experience I learned that whatever you do (besides wearing a seat-belt) you have to avoid trees.
IMHO, more experienced drivers are better, and I've seen some pretty good instincts coming from 40-50 year-old or so acquaintances.
I really don't know what I would do with a sudden acceleration problem. I would probably try to remain calm and wait for it to recover (pushing the acceleration / brake to trigger events, try to stop the engine), and try not crashing.
On a side note ... that's why I don't like cars with automatic transmissions. If my current car experienced a sudden acceleration problem, I could just take it out of gear or do an old-fashioned motor-brake.
I think it's more that experienced drivers are presumably more defensive and therefore more likely to avoid situations (tailgating, etc.) where a sudden acceleration would be tough to recover from.
