[sidewndr46]

For a car it'd be kind of overkill. The failure mode of the system is usually something like "throttle position sensor value out of range" due to bad wiring or a bad sensor. So multiple cores doesn't do anything, because you still wind up pulling over to the side of road. Some aircraft do something like what you're thinking but it's actually separate computer architectures running the same code.

Now if you go back in time far enough to pre-WWII designed vehicles it was common to have two ignition systems with a massive mechanical lever to switch between "magneto" and "coil" based ignition for gas engines in military engines. Coil driven spark plug systems had advantages but the magneto system was much more reliable by virtue of having no moving parts. Diesels had a slight advantage here in that there was no ignition system as such to fail.