I have chased down failures in my jetta ' s electronics , so I do actually have a good idea of how the different systems work together . The accelerator and shifter have their own controllers built into them . If either one detects an irregularity , it will shut down the engine or put the transmission into neutral , respectively . The ecu will not allow any throttle input when the brake pedal is depressed . If there is even a 1 % brake input , the throttle goes down to 0 % and the brakes are mechanically applied . Moving the key to the off position , or pressing the start button for a period of time shuts off power to the ecu . No ecu , no control for the engine . The individual controllers don ' t send analog data to the ecu , they process their own sensor readings keep in mind that the accelerator and shifter have multiple sensors in different locations , that work in different ways , that have to agree with each other at all times and send the data in packets through the canbus system . A controller failure would result in malformed or missing packets that would trigger all sorts of errors and , most likely , the vehicle killing the throttle and shifting into neutral . There simply is no way that all the vehicle ' s systems would fail in a way that they simulate a 100 % throttle application , 0 % brake application , no moving the shifter to neutral , and the body control module failing to recognize the start button being depressed , for 8 minutes . At some point , somewhere , the sensors would have disagreed for a millisecond or two and the various controllers would have realized the sensors were faulty .