Not sure why anyone would sell mats that are not fixed in place. Toyota paid over a billion dollars in fines and settled lawsuits for an additional billion dollars. All of this happened 15 years ago and was well reported.
Regardless of the real issues, unsecured mats have been verboten for over a decade.
It’s still amazing to me that nobody remembers the Toyota thing was mass hysteria, and not an actual issue. They paid it out and settled because it was easier than taking more bad PR, but, those issue were almost entirely pedal misapplication; i.e. people hitting the accelerator when they meant to hit the brake.
Malcolm Gladwell did a great podcast on it:
Or if you’d prefer a car and driver article:
https://www.caranddriver.com/featur...oyotas-unintended-acceleration-scare-feature/
The same exact thing happened with Audis in the 80s, which people will swear up and down were accelerating without warning, but… they weren’t. People were hitting the accelerator instead of the brake. NHTSA later determined all complaints to be due to driver error.
Re: Toyota; In February 2011, the findings of a 10-month-long study conducted by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), aimed to identify the main cause of sudden acceleration in Toyota and Lexus models. The study was requested by the U.S. Congress and "enlisted NASA engineers with expertise in areas such as computer-controlled electronic systems, electromagnetic interference, and software integrity". The most common problem was drivers hitting the accelerator pedal when they thought they were hitting the brake, which the NHTSA called "pedal misapplication." Of the 58 cases reported, 18 were dismissed out of hand. Of the remaining 40, 39 of them were found to have no cause; the remainder being an instance of "pedal entrapment." One investigator says most of the cases involved "pedal misapplication" – that is, "the driver stepped on the gas rather than the brake or in addition to the brake."
So yeah; re-educate your friends. People make dumb choices when they are panicked sometimes; that doesn’t make people dumb, but it also isn’t the floor mats’ fault. We’ve seen it on this very forum, and my wife has succumbed to this herself, and she’s brilliant! But in a new vehicle you’re unfamiliar with (the original Toyota 911 call was in a loaner), and when panicked? It’s easy to hit the wrong pedal, and if you do, you will, I guarantee it, *swear* you were on the correct one. It’s human nature.