"T i m" wrote in message
...
My first instinct was to press the clutch to disengage the engine that was
propelling the car out of control, but I realised that it was not a good
idea to relieve a fast-racing engine of all its mechanical load (!) so I
pressed the footbrake hard and very gingerly turned off the ignition key,
taking care to only turn the engine off, to the "accessory" position and
not
so far as to engage the steering lock (*) and let the car slow down, only
then did I press the clutch to avoid the car lurching to an abrupt halt.

Well done. I would imagine many would have panicked.

My dad commented afterwards that the first he realised of the problem was
when the car braked hard. I imagine I was stunned into silence while I dealt
with the emergency!

I worked out afterwards that the force on each conn rod with an engine
racing at 7000 rpm (the redline speed on cars that have rev counters, which
this didn't) peaks at about the same as the weight of the car. I remember
thinking, in the split second before I decided that pressing the clutch was
a Bad Idea, that if the engine threw a piston, it would be "expensive" :-)

was a bit unnerving. My dad and I looked under the bonnet and sure enough
several strands of the clutch cable had freyed off and were jammed inside
the sheath of the cable.

I've had throttle cables snap (car and bike) but (luckily) only just
give me no throttle.

I suppose that if the cable hadn't frayed and then jammed in the sheath, all
the strands would have broken one by one until one day mum would have
pressed the accelerator and the car wouldn't have moved - and if that had
happened just as she'd set off from a junction, she'd have been a sitting
duck with vehicles bearing down on me. I've had that happen when my Golf
Mark 3 developed intermittent problems with a throttle potentiometer in its
drive-by-wire system (though it took many weeks to diagnose that cause): I
pulled out from a junction, turning right, with plenty of room to spare and
the engine died and wouldn't restart. I rammed it in first and cranked it
with the starter motor until I was at least clear of traffic coming from the
right, and let traffic coming from the left sort itself out. Luckily the car
coming from my left stopped in time, amid a blare of his horn. He leapt out
of the car, calling me every name under the sun, until I explained that the
engine had died after I'd set off, at which point he apologised profusely
and helped me push the car onto a pavement. After waiting ten minutes, the
engine started fine and the car behaved faultlessly for a couple of weeks,
when a bit of lumpy running made me cautious, so I made sure the engine was
racing before I pulled out, just in case.

The car kept going into the garage and they could never find anything. Then
one day I got a phone call from an ecstatic engineer who said that it had
just happened for him while the car had diagnostics attached and so now he
knew what the fault was. The cost of the part was a few pence. The cost of
fitting it was half an hour's labour, but the cost of all that diagnostic
labour was three figures. And the car was now a thousand miles over its
warranty mileage. Luckily I could produce the last service bill, with a
mileage recorded that was under the limit, which recorded "investigate
intermittent poor running and loss of power on acceleration from rest" so I
could prove that the car was well within warranty when I'd first reported
it. VW insurance (with a certain amount of reluctance, the garage said) paid
up!

It was my dad who had the challenge of driving the
car back home, using the slow-running control of the choke to vary the
engine speed and not touching the accelerator pedal at all.

Yup, that's what I did.

Can't do that on a modern fuel-injected petrol or diesel car. I dare say we
might have been able to rig up a piece of string from the throttle lever or
the throttle potentiometer if there hadn't been the get-out of the slow
running control on a carburettor. The ultimate "hand throttle" - a piece of
string coming out of the bonnet and in through a side window to a loop on
dad's finger!

I didn't have much luck with that car: on another occasion I'd reversed into
a farm gateway while out practising for my test, and the gear lever linkage
came off and the lever flopped upside down in my hand. I uttered the
immortal words "it's not supposed to do that, is it?" :-) It was a Renault
6 which had a hockey-stick lever that came out of the dashboard (as on a
Citroen 2CV) and the rod ran across the engine and then a plate welded to
the end engaged with a conventional gear lever sticking out of the gearbox
which was ahead of the engine. A rubber gromit in the plate had come out and
allowed the plate to disengage from the lever.

On another occasion, after I'd passed my test, I'd dropped my mum at work
and went into town. When I came back to the car, there was a huge gash in
the front wing - we think someone in a pickup truck reversed into the car. I
had to drive to pick up mum that evening, making sure I parked with the
opposite side facing where she'd come out, so I had chance to explain what
had happened before she saw it!

At least I didn't blow up the engine, which is what my sister did to mum's
next car some year later. That car, a Renault 14, had a temperature gauge
down by the (conventionally-placed) gear lever - well out of sight of the
dashboard. There was no "high temperature" light on the dashboard. A hose
had leaked and the engine had overheated - and the first my sister knew was
when the car stalled and the starter wouldn't turn the engine. That cost a
new engine - I remember us taking the car to a *very* dodgy garage in west
London that her boyfriend knew of, to get as cheap a repair as possible.
That car eventually was written off, again while my sister was driving, when
a dustbin lorry ploughed into the back of her when she was stopped at
lights.

As a family, we take great care of our cars - but my sister and I seem to
have been very unlucky with unexpected things that weren't really our fault;
one was due to atrocious design (fancy putting a temperature gauge where
it's not in the driver's line of sight), two were things that even a service
might well not have picked up, and one was someone else's fault.