Has anybody ever seen statistics of motor accidents where disorientated drivers stomp on the accelerator pedal instead of the brakes?
There was much prominence given in the United States in the middle 1980s to incidents in which drivers asserted that their cars accelerated wildly while the driver was "standing on the brakes".
A feast of injury lawyers and "investigative journalists" pushed particularly the theory that an Audi model was flawed, with an attendant plummet in sales and resale values.
As anyone familiar with the relative capabilities of passenger car brakes and engines would assume, these cases almost certainly represented driver confusion of the sort you specify. The most common venue was in parking lots and driveways, not the open road, as people most often made this mistake on first disengaging "PARK" in an automatic transmission car.
Provision of an interlock which required brake pedal depression in order to disengage PARK removed much of this class of event.
True, there was nothing wrong with the cars, but there was an achievable improvement.