The Audi 5000 was a really revolutionary car for most Americans. It was fast powerful and the styling was completely different than American cars. It became the status symbol for uban upper middleclass very quickly. The husbands purchased the car but It was the women who generally drove it. They were ill prepared to drive such a high performance car with an automatic transmission.
My understanding was the pedals were a diffenent spacing than the lumbering American sedans they were used to driving.
The accidents were very tragic ususally involving the mother pushing her small child at the front of the car though the garage door and out the back of the garage.
The American car magazines at the time, poo pooed the claims that it was the cars fault. Showing quite easily that the engine could not overcome the brakes.
Audis, sales plummeted.
However, many Audi owners that ignored the false claims noticed that their cars were not entirely reliable and their repair costs were skyhigh. That is what killed Audi in the US for sometime. Not the unintended acceleration claims.
Then unintended acceleration problem was partially solved when the brake pedal had to be depressed in order to shift the car out of park, due to these claims against Audi.
Every couple of months usually an elderly person drives their car into a store here in Houston. I'm sure they claim the devil took over the car, but we know what it was.
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