Some kill switches feature a removable, protective barrier against accidental activation (e.g. a plastic cover that must be lifted or glass that must be broken), known as a mollyguard.

Kill switches are features of mechanisms whose normal operation or foreseeable misuse might cause injury or death; industrial designers include kill switches because damage to or the destruction of the machinery is less important than preventing workplace injuries and deaths.

NASCAR requires all their stock cars to be equipped with a steering wheel–mounted kill switch, in case the accelerator pedal sticks and the driver needs to shut down the engine.

[citation needed] Early aviators using rotary engine–powered aircraft from the beginnings of their use in 1908, up through the end of World War I in 1918 had what could be called a reversed functionality version of the "dead man's switch" for cutting the ignition voltage to the spark plugs on such a power-plant, to give a degree of in-flight speed control for a rotary engine.

Such devices are often placed in bait cars and configured so that observing police can trigger the switch remotely.

[3] This same idea can make the stolen object, such as a smartphone, useless to both the thief and whoever buys it, yet allow the true owner to reactivate it when/if it is recovered.

[9][10] There is a debate about implementing kill switches in robots[11] and advanced artificial intelligence systems.

This provides a rapid means to disconnect the energy source of the device to protect workers.

In the European Union, most types of machinery are required to be equipped with an emergency stop according to the Directive 2006/42/EC.

[15] Machine specific (type-C) standards often include specific requirements for the emergency stop functions, but in the absence of a relevant type-C standard, the risk assessment should be used to determine whether or not an emergency stop function would be useful in avoiding or limiting harm.

Elevators[19][20] often have a red two-way button on the control panel which is either marked "Emergency Stop" or "Run/Stop".

In other cases, some other treadmills have a more traditional kill switch, often mounted towards the rear of one of the hand railings.

Range-safety officers may also manually destroy vehicles; this method was used to destruct errant solid rocket boosters in the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster.