Patent ID: 8666563

Claim:
A determination apparatus which is installed in a vehicle and determines occurrence of an erroneous application of an accelerator, comprising: a longitudinal acceleration calculation unit which obtains acceleration applied in the longitudinal direction of a body of the vehicle based on a signal from a G-sensor installed in the vehicle, removes an acceleration component corresponding to gravity from the obtained acceleration applied in the longitudinal direction, and regards the resultant value as longitudinal acceleration; a selection unit which selects criteria data, when considering a first case where the absolute value of the longitudinal acceleration is a first value and a second case where the absolute value of the longitudinal acceleration is a second value larger than the first value, so that a range of accelerator opening variation by which occurrence of an erroneous application of the accelerator is determined or a range of accelerator opening by which occurrence of an erroneous application of the accelerator is determined in the second case becomes larger than that in the first case; and a determination unit which determines whether or not the accelerator has been erroneously applied, by applying the current variation in the accelerator opening or the current accelerator opening to the selected criteria data; wherein the criteria data remains selected for a predetermined period of time; and the criteria data is selected from a table that allocates a threshold of accelerator opening variation to each of a plurality of accelerator openings.