I’m on a number of car pages on Facebook, and a few people have posted the same story.

They’re sitting in their vehicle, revving the engine a bit to warm it up faster (yes, I know, but that’s not the issue I’m curious about, I already know that’s dumb)… and then eventually their throttle stops responding.

They can shift gears and the vehicle will move under idle, but the throttle does nothing until they restart, at which point everything is normal.

My theory is that this is a safety feature. Say you’re sitting in your car, engine running, waiting for something… and you fall asleep. Foot goes onto the accelerator pedal and pushes it to the floor. Your engine revs until it overheats, and eventually the car even catches fire. There’s plenty of videos out there of this very thing happening.

But, I’ve never heard of such a safety feature. Granted I’ve been out of a shop environment for a decade now so I’m not entirely up to speed… yet I was thinking, maybe on drive by wire vehicles, if the computer recognizes that you’re revving too much in park or neutral, it disables the accelerator pedal input to prevent you from “dead footing” yourself into an incident?

Have any of you heard of such a safety feature, or is it more likely that something’s wrong with these people’s cars?