This bothers me more than it should.
It should be called the decoupler pedal because that’s what it actually does.
this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2026
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Accelerator isn’t accurate because it still works, but won’t accelerate in neutral.
The brakes cause acceleration, too.
Relevant:
Take your pick lol
or
lol
Love it, thanks.
It still accelerates the engine.
No, that's the throttle. The accelerator is just an input control linked to the many things that make the engine go BRRR.
If anything, the flywheel is the most acceleratey bit since it can make things increase in speed even if the engine is at sustained rpm because the driver died of boredom reading this.
Respect. You’re right. It should be called gas/fuel/energy pedal because you always get more of it when you press it while actual acceleration has more dependencies.
In most gasoline vehicles it's the throttle pedal. Pressing it reduces how much you're throttling the engines air supply
It feels weird because it’s a pedal, but I guess it counts as a throttle.
The throttle is the actual valve, a piece of metal sitting inside the air intake that rotates to allow various amounts of air to pass into the engine.
That thing, the valve, is still properly called a throttle on all IC engines. And even the very modern computerized gas engines have one.
In older direct fuel injection, the accelerator pedal was still directly connected to the throttle valve. A separate fuel injection control system increased and decreased the amount of fuel going in to maintain a steady fuel-air ratio.
On modern automobiles, the pedal is usually fully "fly-by-wire". The computer reads the pedal position like a joystick and decides how to move the throttle and fuel injection to achieve the commander input.
Electric cars are built around brushless DC motors. The "DC" there is a bit of a misnomer. These motors rely on a microprocessor to generate the variable-frequency AC waveforms to drive the stators in real time. This allows higher efficiency than older motor control technology, but it means that there's basically no way to operate the motor without the motor control software. So in these cars the pedal is always just a joystick input.
Not all IC engines, but all gasoline ones.
Diesel engines are really more like colloquial term gas pedal, the more you push, the more the injector pumps dispense. That’s what m makes diesels more efficient (no pumping losses like a gasoline engine.
Unfortunately they are dirty as hell.
But not when the isTest flag is set. Then they're clean as a whistle.
Classics are neat but nowadays we have the human interface power setting sensor.