It likely has happened in other vehicles, you likely just had time to correct the mistake in your pre-EV vehicles. Unlike their sluggish ICE counterparts, the Model S/X/3 will immediately respond to a throttle request. You don't have the same time to react, consciously or unconsciously, to the mistake before action is taken by the vehicle. In the case of the S/X/3, you're likely to have moved the vehicle a significant distance prior to figuring out that you screwed up, where in an ICE, especially an automatic, the engine is likely to rev and gears need to be changed, yada yada, in response to the throttle mash... generally enough time to realize your error. I've almostmade a pedal misapplication mistake several times in the past with multiple different vehicles... fortunately not in any catastrophic situation. We're not infallible creatures. You get in a zone of habit, feel like you know what's going on, and when something unexpected happens you'll swear you were doing everything normally the way you've done it 10000 times before, when in reality you just screwed up. It happens.
Tesla's accelerator pedal is actually the exact same drive-by-wire pedal used in several other manufacturer's vehicles. It's highly proven technology over decades. Nothing special at this point. No Tesla secret sauce here. Just two hall effect sensors with slightly different curves for redundancy and position validation. If they don't agree, the car doesn't move. If one has an issue, the car reduces power and gives an error. I've personally never seen one of these throttle assemblies have a problem because they're literally as basic as these things can get. It's plastic, a spring to return the pedal to rest, and two hall effect sensors for positioning. They're rock solid on reliability and used in millions of vehicles.
Tesla's side for sensing this goes even further to improve safety. They have two independent systems monitoring and logging the pedal sensors, isolated from one another. They both log the read position from both sensors. If anything doesn't exactly agree, the car doesn't move, gives an error, and reduces power to the point where you can barely do 0-60 in a minute.
The autopilot side of things also is not capable of accelerating the car at any major speed. The AP system just tells the motor, "this is how fast I want to be going and this is how quickly I want to get there" and the inverter firmware maps out a curve to get the car there based on the data, clamped internally to extremely reasonable values as far as acceleration goes. (Deceleration is another story, since AP is capable of commanding full regen and full braking.) The fastest AP can do 0-60 on its own is pretty pathetic, overall. I've tried it. The car will not launch even when commanded to go to 90 MPH at max longitudinal acceleration rate. It just gradually ramps speed, just as if you were at a light behind a vehicle with AP engaged. Nothing sudden about it.
I went a step further and modified the section of inverter code that limits the acceleration rate. No dice. The two other systems inside the drive unit immediately sent the system into limp mode when I tried to command massive acceleration digitally. To be able to do a full digital launch with no pedal application I had to modify the firmware in three different systems to bypass probably two dozen different safety checks. Long story short, it's simply not possible for the car to command massive acceleration on its own.
Going even further, the throttle map for acceleration is super accurate. It can interpolate 2^16 throttle positions with reasonable accuracy... which is impressive, since the ADC is technically something like 10-bit, and we're working with a throw distance of maybe a couple of inches at the end of the pedal. (Edit: Correction/clarification: The crosscheck ADC is 10-bit, the primary is actually 16-bit and doubled for redundancy on each input... so the throttle position is actually read 8 times in hardware for comparison.)
Finally, if the brake is applied, three different devices report this. There's the brake pedal switch, the iBooster, and the ESP modules. All are able to sense and report brake pedal application, and the three systems in the drive unit accept these in a binary OR fashion (if any report the brake is applied, the brake is applied). If the brake is applied even a tiny bit, the car is incapable of accelerating at full power. At best, if the accelerator is already pressed, the car will apply something like 5% of power for about a second before fully cutting power due to both pedals being applied. Those that think they had their foot on the brake and suddenly accelerated, try it yourself. Go somewhere safe with open space in front of you, apply the brake, and mash the accelerator. You'll either go no where, or at most move at super low power for less than a second (depending on the exact internal state of the system, which would be too complicated to get into full detail here).
Overall, I have a lot of beef with Tesla over many things... but this is one aspect where they did their homework and did it right. I'd argue that Tesla's throttle setup is probably at least twice as safe if not more than any other drive-by-wire throttle system out there. There are some many independent checks that it is just impossible for the car to do something like full acceleration without the drive explicitly commanding it, either intentionally or unintentionally, via the throttle pedal.
Of course, humans are going to human... and thus never fully accept responsibility for their actions or mistakes when there is a way to push that onto someone or something else. But my advice is to just get over it, keep the car in chill mode, and move on. In this particular case, your wife made a mistake, caused some damage to the vehicle, and that's the end of it. No sense trying to argue otherwise... especially in the case of a Tesla vehicle with its extensive logging and redundancy. Should someone ever take such a case to court and try to go against the data, I couldn't see how a reasonable judge or jury could possibly see this as anything other than what it is.
