Buildings continue to be struck by wayward motor vehicles. The general viewpoint is that this is related to pedal misapplication. The number of these incidents is rarely publicized as many of these result in little or no injury to the driver or occupants in the struck building. Unfortunately this is not always the case.
On Wednesday afternoon, September 9th, 2025 an SUV reportedly crashed into a child day care building and this caused a fatality to a toddler and injuries to 6 other children. Building impacts do not draw the public’s attention until something like this causes official news media to post the findings. But rarely are the details of these incidents ever reported to the proper level that the public can understand what important factors caused the incident.
In the present case views of the day care building showed that there was no protection in the building structure from such an impact. The SUV appeared to strike a large window and there was no other structure around it to prevent the vehicle from entering where the children were. In hindsight this is not a good situation and if sudden accelerations of vehicles continue to be a regular occurrence some thought needs to be put to create barriers in buildings that could be struck.
However a greater concern has to be with the accepted belief that nothing can be done with sudden, unintended acceleration as this is nothing but a driver error issue with no other resolution. Indeed, modern motor vehicles are complex machines with many modules communicating with each other and there is very little information available to understand how vehicle functions could affect unintended acceleration. Increasingly vehicle manufacturers are the only ones who have access to the details of how their vehicles perform and when a malfunction occurs they are very unlikely to make that known.