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In a Youtube video, a man's gas pedal gets stuck all the way down while driving on the highway at 100 mph. He claims he is unable to put the car in neutral, and refuses to pull the e-brake. He calls 911 and is eventually stopped by the police, who use spikes to blow out his tires.

I thought it was obvious that in this situation, you should slowly pull the e-break to at least slow you down. However, many people in the comments said this is a bad idea; they claim that at best, the e-brake would just break immediately and be ineffective, and at worst, something else could happen internally that makes you lose control of the car.

What is the worst case scenario of slowly pulling the e-brake while the gas pedal is stuck? Could anything go horribly wrong?

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  • If your e-brake is strong enough then you would fish-tail uncontrollably. If it's not strong then the tires would keep spinning until your brakes caught fire and last I checked cars are generally not designed to be driven while on fire. If you slowly pull a strong e-brake then you risk heating your brakes past the point of failure before reaching sufficient clamping pressure. A lot of this is less applicable if the car is in neutral but all bets are off when your measly rear brakes have to contend with an engine at speed and in full throttle.
    – MonkeyZeus
    Commented May 17, 2021 at 17:55
  • @MonkeyZeus, I believe you have the correct answer. Unrelated - I fail to see why the driver would not be able to put a car in Neutral or at least kill the ignition. Yet another reason to drive a manual transmission vehicle.
    – EᑎOT
    Commented May 17, 2021 at 19:25
  • @EᑎOT When your car is self-propelling at 100 mph I would completely understand if the driver was too flustered to properly put it in neutral. My best guess is that they didn't want to kill the engine by over-revving it in neutral and risking their face getting acquainted with a piston rod through the dashboard. Was it selfish? Maybe, what would you do in their shoes though?
    – MonkeyZeus
    Commented May 17, 2021 at 20:04
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    @MonkeyZeus I am incredibly surprised. Revving to the max for an extended time can cause a piston rod to fly into the cabin? Aren't those things inside the engine?
    – user56202
    Commented May 17, 2021 at 22:24
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    @MonkeyZeus, what's more risky - being in a car you allegedly cannot stop or a slight chance of overrevving the engine? Computer should not let it overrev much anyway. There's a lot of metal separating the driver from piston rod, chance are practically nil. You're calling it selfish? No, I'd say stupid. In either case, in this situation the driver's first priority should be not hurting other people first.
    – EᑎOT
    Commented May 18, 2021 at 13:56

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In all the VWs I currently own (5) pulling the e-brake causes the ECM to drop the throttle to idle.

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