0.5% failure rate (in what time though?) in this type of use is unacceptable. It should be a simple, idiot-proof control input integral to safe operation of the vehicle.
An electrical throttle can, if it's done properly, be used to control engine power safely and reliably; in fact all cars with electrically controlled fuel injection do that, no matter if the throttle pedal itself is dealth with mechanical linkage to the engine or with an electrical system. Of course, you would want a fairly reliable electric throttle; I would not recommend subcontracting it to Logitech.
That said, mechanical linkage throttles have had issues with throttle stuck open as well, but not on a level that would affect a whole production batch of cars. Why is it not particularly fatal, historically speaking? Because in a proper car you can push the clutch down and set gear to neutral. Personally I'd say the accidents and fatalities associated to this particular problem are probably not only the singular fault of the throttle system, but a compound result of all the ultimately unnecessary systems in the cars that cause an aberration from normal operation of the machinery to become a fatal malfunction. It's all fine and well to have better fuel efficiency, safety and ease of operation while everything works out normally, but when one can not turn the engine off because power brakes (?) and power steering requires the engine to run to operate normally, I call shenanigans on that sort of technology. A car should be able to remain fully controllable when engine shuts down during drive (as a result of whatever).
Things become all sorts of more dangerous if you truly cannot either turn the engine off or put the gear to neutral. If these cars' gear boxes cannot be switched to neutral so that no power is transmitted to wheels, then the issue becomes fully the car's fault. If not, I would expect any competent driver to react to uncontrolled power increase by turning the power transmission off, either with pushing down the clutch and setting gear to neutral, or putting the automatic transmission to neutral, either way. Then stop the car and turn off engine. If this cannot be done, then the issue becomes a much more of a death trap rather than an annoying malfunction.
Of course, personally I dislike power steering in normal automobiles. If you can't turn the steering wheel without power steering, you're either driving a too big car or you need to go to the gym. Personally, I've driven cars with and without power steering, both on highways and in cities and parking lots and in all cases I have preferred the cars without power steering, because they had a tighter feedback between the position of the steering wheel and the position of the front wheels, and they also delivered more precise information about the surface of the road; I had much more information about the traction of the road with the cars with no power steering. Plus, when the engine is turned off the steering becomes really heavy (though manageable) in cars with power steering...
Power brakes are in fact ok, because they are operated by a vacuum servo that uses a stored vacuum to increase the braking force, and the brakes can still be operated when the vacuum is depleted by pumping the brakes to build up pressure in absence of the vacuum servo -
unless the car just happens to have ABS brakes in which case pumping the brakes becomes completely useless....
Same goes, to lesser extent, with automatic gear boxes, traction control and ABS brakes, in descending order of aggravation. Automatic gear boxes obviously make it a whole lot more convenient to drive automobiles around in an environment where speed greatly varies (read: towns and cities). But it's not really necessary after you learn to drive stick, plus you get a third, awesome pedal in your feet which can be used to directly regulate the engine's connection to the drivetrain. In addition, the car can be towed on neutral (what a revolutionary feature) and you can decide yourself when to change gears (which you can use to regulate fuel efficiency to some extent).
Traction control, ugh, where do I begin. Not only does it make people think their cars can be driven against the laws of physics (
"But I had traction control, I shouldn't have lost the control of the car!") but they also prevent them from learning to react to weather conditions and to correct small mistakes. Essentially, it prevents a lot of small errors and piles them into catastrophic loss of traction when the interface between the tires and the road simply can not provide large enough sideways force to keep the car on the road - and as a result it goes into the woods perfectly straight and "under control". See, traction control has nothing to do with controlling traction. It controls the car's heading in situations where traction is already lost, and prevents it from turning sideways while waiting for velocity to die down and the traction to return. Saying that it controls traction is false in the first place; nothing in the car can control that except the driver, who must keep the situational velocity at appropriate level. Traction control simply makes it normally unnecessary to learn this; without traction control, you are forced to compensate for small loss of traction manually, and you get a warning of the road traction a whole lot earlier than when you have ESP or other driving aids available.
For partially same reasons, though to lesser extent, I don't particularly like ABS brakes either. True, it keeps the car controllable under braking and since it makes the basic instinctual reaction of any sane driver - to stood on the brakes when they want the car to STOP NOW OH GOD into an actually correct action and stops the car in fast, efficient and correct way. When it works. But again it removes the need for drivers to actually learn to brake in a controllable fashion, and can cause issues when malfunctioning, or when a driver assumes the car has ABS, or assumes that there aren't ABS brakes, since the two require different braking methods.
Summa summarum.
If the technology on cars goes to the level that they start suffering from operating system crashes and bugs and you need to restart the system to get out of error state, I call shenanigans. What are they going to do next,
upgrade the drivers?
