I'm calling b.s. for many
I'm calling b.s. for many reasons.
1) The engine does not have the power to propel the car forward if you are applying even a moderate amount of braking, even with the larger 3.6R. You HAVE to let off the brake to get any forward movement. I've purposely done this with a current gen Subaru and the bigger 3.6L engine.
2) If the car had eyesight and is enabled with the crash mitigation. It will NOT let you run into anything, even if your foot is on the gas with the pedal to the floor. I have been in situations where I had to purposely turn this off just to move the car forward. This is a secondary system that is working on addition to your inputs, and it's a system that's independently controlling the ABS system, regardless of what the throttle (any part of it) is doing. The vehicle would need to have eyesight and would need the forward collision mitigation enabled.
3) In the words of everyone's favorite tv doctor, House, everyone lies. A person just crashed their car stupidly in a way where if they told the truth they'd be out $10k, $15k, $20k or whatever, they will question their morality REALLY hard, and most, very much most, will lie through their teeth to not instantly lose $20k on the spot. You would be kind of insane not to. It's not even an ethics thing. It's a risk/reward thing. The reward is a free car. The risk about equal to telling the truth.
4) There's a lot of terrible drivers. Be it a pack of experience, a lack of understanding of the mechanics, poor attention, and odd reaction behaviors. I have a friend who's natural reaction to his car sliding on some loose gravel or snow or ice was too crank the wheel full lock to one side and slam the gas, and then he'd freeze in place holding these inputs...for 20 seconds. He replaced 8 bumpers on one car in like 2 years driving straight into ditches and snow banks. For him, this was nearly involuntary to the sensation of the car sliding and how his brain processed and coped. Even a slight sensation triggered basically a 20 second automatic episode to which he wasn't really aware. I took him rallycrossing for a season just to unbreak his mind. He's a much better driver now, but people do this kind of stuff. I have another friend who can't talk on the phone and drive, not even hands free. He'll drive through stoplights and drive info parked cars doing so. That's how his brain functions. Cars are complex machines, and modern ones are a lot fancier with a lot of visual candy to distract you. There are a lot of bad drivers.
5) Lawsuits like this come up all the time and with a wide variety of brands. What has been historically common was actual defects are extremely rare. The majority of cases, including testing, attempting to repeat with the exact car, and collecting data logs of all sensors which includes throttle position, throttle plate control, air intake, brake application, motion sensors, and all kinds of other metrics, well, they basically find most people are bold faced liers. The car data didn't match what people said happened. The car and components don't repeat the problem and pass testing, news and people move on, and it all goes away until a new person lies to a news station.
Are there legitimate cases? Yeah...a few very isolated events.