re: tail lamp bulbs question

["Sedon, Doug (OD)" <sedond@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

gary, you said (among other things):
>A friend recently experienced sudden acceleration in her '89 190E.
>What happened is that she turned on the motor, applied the brake and
>then selected reverse to back out of her garage. At that time the car
>accelerated and his a brick wall, demolishing the wall and causing the
>car to be totalled....
>In looking at the NTHSC site, I can see that there is a number of
>other instances of this sort of thing happening with this and other MB
>models, as well as with other makes of vehicle. This leads one to
>suspect a possible manufacturing or design defect of some sort.
>
>In talking to the Mercedes rep about the incident, he is reporting to
>her that there is a way, within either the taillamp or the bulb, to
>determine if the brakes were actually applied at the time of impact...
>
>Possible of course, but given that there appear to be more than 40
>similar cases documented with this and similar models (260E, 280E,
>300E), my tendancy is to believe that something other than the driver
>may have been amiss in the car at the time of this incident.
>
>I have never heard of anything like this (the lights being designed in
>the manner described) at all before. Can the collective wisdom of the
>digests add anything to this? 
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sorry, gary, sounds like an old "60 minutes" audi story to me.  sounds like your
friend stepped on the gas, not the brakes.  sounds like more than 40 other benz
owners have done likewise.  in the audi case, the ONLY thing that was ever
determined, was that the accelerator pedal was offset towards the brake pedal a
little more than most cars awailable in the usa market at the time.  even if m/b
DIDN'T have some special circuit designed into the car that could tell whether
or not the brakes were used, i'd suspect operator error.

one person's opinion,

doug s

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