Ford: F-150 Sudden Acceleration, ford f 150, sudden acceleration

Question
Sudden Acceleration

I almost feel silly writing about sudden acceleration since I believe that it is usually operator error. Well, no more…not since it happened to me.

I have a 1997 Ford F-150 XLT 4x4 with a 5.4 engine, automatic transmission and 136,000 miles on it. I had a rather frightening situation happen to me today.  I was pulling into a gravel parking lot going extremely slow in two wheel drive. I had my left foot already on the brake and as I made the turn to park next to another vehicle I lightly tapped the gas pedal and suddenly the engine roared to full power. I instantly stood on the brake with both feet and plowed forward about 16 feet until I smacked into the side of a metal building. The engine dropped to normal idle speed but did not kill. I put it in reverse and backed up normally and turned the engine off. I started it back up and it ran normally.  This all happened in a matter of seconds. There was no time to turn the ignition off or shift into neutral. I inspected the gravel lot and you could see where the rear tires had spun and dug into the gravel and the skid marks of the front tires on the grass up to where I was pushed into the building.

There was no damage to the truck – just some paint from the metal siding on the bumper. The steel siding on the building was buckled and pushed in about six inches. I’ve owned this truck for nine years and have never had anything like this happen before.  I have not taken it to a Ford dealer to look at it yet…not sure they’d find anything anyway but something is definitely not right. I visually checked the accelerator linkage and did not see anything obviously wrong. Also, the floor mat was not in any contact with the gas pedal.

The only recent work I had on the engine was approximately a month ago (850 miles) when it was missing terribly. This same thing happened about 4 years ago and it turned out to be a bad coil pack for cylinder #1.  This turned out to be the same problem but for cylinder #5.  The shop replaced the coil pack and it ran great.  Would there be any possibility that when the coil pack on cylinder #5 was replaced that the mechanic could have damaged or interfered with the accelerator linkage?  That’s the only thing I can think of.  Any thoughts what caused this sudden acceleration would be appreciated.


Answer
That a new one for me i never heard of this ever happing.Were you giving it gas and it stuck or did it just go to the floor by it self?Now on the other hand it could of been the cruse control cause it does run through the steering wheel and if you were turning at the time it could of activated the cruse and then that would control the throttle cause it works off of a seriate cable.In that case you my have a short in the system.