VW is the worlds most advanced spent most R&D

You're not getting it. If manufacturers can take weight and cost out of a vehicles components that are not selling points or required by legislation, combine components with others to reduce their cost or eliminate them completely, they will. Modern cars are bloated enough as it is, go adding in more safety features and control units and any other nerdy features that will attract more buyers and it all adds weight, which of course reduces economy, performance and handling. Even items like horns for instance would not be fitted if they weren't a legal requirement, why would you, it's not required for the car to fulfill its function as transport. They are not interested in the long term durability of the product, the programmed life of a car is 10 years in their view, which amazingly enough is about the length of time a polycarbonate headlight lasts before it deteriorates. Owners of cars older than this are regarded as stupid and not worth worrying about.

You gotta be an engineer to be a rule maker. and a lot of rule makers aren't engineers. Motorsport has the same problem.

My Vw is 54 years old.
The glass headlights are fine, I put a new carby on it but it ran like shite so I put the old one back on.
New Vw, nah prob not for me.

You look at almost all those accidents, nearly every one of them involved people in unfamiliar cars and the black boxes showed that they had put there foot down on the accelerator and not the brake, including the famous case of the women calling 911 when her hubby was driving the loaner Lexus and claimed it would not stop. He had his foot down on the go pedal the whole time assuming it was the brake.

The media blew it up doing that fake crap with an old camry but the fact is Toyota and pretty much every car maker doesn't make a car whose brakes cant over power the engine. (try it)

Drivers got into a panic at the wheel of an unfamiliar car, toyota rather than look like they were not doing something about and blaming the victims, it took it on the chin as the media were having a feeding frenzy

Lol Cabrio1, your old VW is fine, I'm guessing a Beetle, you wouldn't want a new Beetle the engine is in the front now.

Post # 30
I have a feeling that there was more to it & it was a pretty much overblown situation designed to extract a lot of $$ out of a foreign company to pay local workers to fix the 'problem'.
Basically a way generating jobs at somebody else's expense & injecting some $$ into the economy,

Ie, extortion.
Same with VW & Diesel gate & the airbag fiasco too.

Re the high profile 28 Aug 2009 Lexus ES 350 fatal crash, you misrepresent the situation.

Note that the driver was a Off duty Highway patrol officer & a vehicle inspector. It is fair to assume he had more driver training than a typical person.

It false to state that he had his foot on the accelerator thinking it was brake. Crash was blamed on the wrong floor mates entrapping the accelerator. Brake rotor damage indicated endured breaking.

Issues in this case were:
- Stuck accelerator (obviously), no functioning fail-safe mode to over-ride the accelerator input during concurrent heavy breaking.
- Vacuum booster for breaks doesn't replenish at wide open throttle. once booster is gone, cira 80kg of peddle force is required to hold against wide open throttle. - with the booster it is only 7 -18 kg's of force.
- Driver didn't put the car in neutral. Speculated that gear lever was in tiptronic area, so shifting upwards gave instruction to increase gear, rather than go to neutral as an auto in drive. (driver may have been unable to look due to high speed, and hence not known to move the stick left then up).
- Driver wasn't aware that push button start cars need the button held down for 3+ seconds to kill the engine when in motion, and hence attempts to kill the engine failed.

Sadly, either of the last two actions would have saved 4 peoples lives, with putting the car in neutral being the preference as power steering is maintained. (engine will just bounce of the rev limiter)

Sounds like the fault was the pedal caught on a floor mat.