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There has been a lot of talk about the safety of the left foot accelerator recently.  The reason for the talk is that some mobility equipment dealers have stopped selling them.  There is no real evidence that they are dangerous but mobility equipment dealers are responding to costly litigation resulting from accidents involving the left foot accelerator.

Experienced Driver Rehabilitation Specialists will probably tell you, it is the device that can be more difficult to become accustom to, but I do not believe the device itself is dangerous.  In many cases it may be the only option for a person who has a right sided paralysis. 

In my experience people who have driven a stick shift or other mechanical equipment such as hi-lo’s seem to catch on earlier and there are some who seem to be independent from the get-go.  But more often, the driver has to really concentrate not to confuse the gas pedal for the brake pedal.  Errors often occur in training when coasting, it seems the trainee confuses the brake for the accelerator because they are neither accelerating nor braking.  This is why I have a training brake on the car! 

A while back, I was working with a woman who did very well during the evaluation in the parking lot and we quickly progressed from driving in a protected area to residential and highway environments.  We were on her third and final training session and everything was going very well.  She made no errors and was very consistent form the start. 

When we were approaching an intersection, an oncoming car made a left turn, immediately followed by the car behind him.  The second car did not yield to our right of way, causing the woman I was working with to brake hard to avoid a collision.  Unfortunately she did not remove her left foot off the accelerator and actually used her right foot for the brake, so we had simultaneous acceleration and braking. 

Fortunately I was able to bring the car under control to avoid an accident.  But I was really stunned that someone doing so well would make such an error.  I learned an important lesson about the left foot accelerator. 

Now we do more training with the left foot accelerator.  I do rule out people that have difficulty with motor planning and there is no discharging the patient to practice with another licensed driver to become independent.  They must be independent with me. 

So, while I do not believe the left foot accelerator is a dangerous device.  I do believe that it can be more prone to operator error in the early stages of driving with one.  It must be respected and like all new drivers, should not be used while participating in another task (conversation, eating, drinking use of GPS) until the driver has many miles of driving with it under their belt.