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Tesla: Model X Accident Caused By Driver Error, Not Autopilot (computerworld.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Tesla has responded to a recent report from a Model X owner claiming their vehicle suddenly accelerated at "maximum speed" by itself, jumped a curb and slammed into the side of a building while his wife was sitting behind the wheel. They said it analyzed vehicle logs, "which confirm that this Model X was operating correctly under manual control and was never in Autopilot or cruise control at the time of the incident or in the minutes before. Data shows that the vehicle was traveling at 6 mph when the accelerator pedal was abruptly increased to 100%. Consistent with the driver's action, the vehicle applied torque and accelerated as instructed. Safety is the top priority at Tesla and we engineer and build our cars with this foremost in mind. We are pleased that the driver is ok and ask our customers to exercise safe behavior when using our vehicles." When will people stop lying about Tesla's Autopilot mode crashing their cars? One Tesla owner recently filed a Lemon Law claim against the company over a high number of quality control issues.
I'd be inclined to agree with you but for one thing... A few years ago Tesla let BBC Top Gear test a Roadster, and Jeremy Clarkson lampooned the vehicle in a way that annoyed Elon Musk. Ever since then Tesla have put a *lot* of data capture capability and performance monitoring into all of their vehicles, specifically to stop these sorts of claims.
If Tesla are saying that the telemetry from the black box shows 100% throttle, then at this juncture, I'd be inclined to believe them.
Years ago I spent my spare time helping a friend run his garage business, which included running a contract with a local Police force to recover accident-damaged vehicles. I saw numerous examples of situations in which drivers of automatic cars [and all Teslas are automatic by default] encountered something unexpected on the road. Their first instinct was to slam down on the brake pedal, but you would be amazed at how many managed to hit the throttle by mistake. In the panic and shock of an event, the body can lock up involuntarily, especially, if you think about it, if your car suddenly shot forward under the full acceleration that a Tesla is capable of...
It's way too early to say without more concrete data, but based on the above two points [knowledge of Tesla's extensive telemetry and personal experience of real-world examples like this] my "Occam's Razor" punt would suggest that something happened, the driver panicked, hit the wrong pedal, and the rest is history...
If my car suddenly accelerated, I would call that "on autopilot" in a car that has an autopilot. Users are not engineers, especially not 45 year old wives. By the way, sudden acceleration is not an unusual "cause" of car crashes. It is typically caused by (old) people mixing up the gas and brake pedals, and of course, once the car starts accelerating, they push the (wrong) pedal all the way down. Afterwards they report braking as hard as they could and the car accelerating nevertheless, i.e. they insinuate technical fault, even in low-tech cars. It's not lying. They report it as they experienced it.
So far, Tesla has been incredibly customer friendly. Until that changes, the data they collect serves to make their products better.
When that changes...
Tesla is a public company... Google made the "don't be evil" promise once as well, it'll never last...
You may laugh, but, from the actual article:
"researchers found that there were seven to 15 crashes per month in the U.S. caused by pedal application errors. Females were the drivers in nearly two-thirds of the pedal misapplication crashes identified in crash databases and in a media scan used in the study."
At the very least I expect someone to be able to operate a machine so that it is of no harm to me. If the person is unwilling or unable to learn enough about the machine to not be a threat to others, the person has no right to operate the machine.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Almost all gas pedals in cars are implemented as potentiometers. (Not only Tesla. This is being done for years now.)
A pot-meter has 3 legs and both resistor values are measured.
If the measurements don't agree, an error is logged in hte on-board computer (and warning is generated) and the safest value is assumed.
So in case of a 100% acceleration one measurement would be "low" and the other "high", the exact oposite of not touching the gas pedal.
If you are wondering: The AD convertors are also separated in hardware.
In other news: In electronically controlled cars, applying the gas pedal and the breaks at the same time, get you an error and only breaks...
Determining if it's a sensor problem is easy in the vast majority of cases with a single sensor. Sure a common sensor failure can register an end point value like 0 or 100%, as those are the most common failures. But most systems can set up where full pedal is only 90% throttle, full off is 10%, and that shows a failure right there. Similarly with good resolution a human in a bumpy vehicle cannot hold a sensor at an exact value for long either, again showing a failure (just like how force sticks in old keyboards rezero).
Simply sampling the pedal 10k times a second is another way. A pedal is a physical device and as such probably cannot be moved through its travel much faster than in 0.1 seconds. You should have one thousand readings showing a smooth transition from unpressed to fully pressed. That is a world of difference from going from unpressed to pressed in 0.0001 seconds - a single sensor reading time sample
Another common sensor fault is getting lots of jitter. Again you can see that the sensor can't be functioning realistically because real pedals cannot move that fast.
Add in a bunch of very simple algorithms and it's pretty easy to approach 100% accuracy in determining if a sensor is feeding correct data or not. It's so trivial and sensor design 101 that I can't imagine all three of these are not already in the tesla.
This isn't something I can imagine doing anywhere near as badly in a manual. You panic, you stomp brake and clutch. Miss the brake and go for the accelerator, and you rev like crap but don't accelerate. You miss the clutch, you stall it. Seems like quite a challenge to miss the clutch and hit the foot rest, whilst simultaneously missing the brake and hitting the accelerator.
http://www.nhtsa.gov/staticfil...
Researchers reviewed each crash narrative to determine whether the crash actually resulted
from a pedal application error. Of the 2,930 crashes, 2,411 were caused by a driver applying the
accelerator when he or she intended to apply the brake. Fifty-eight were the result of the driver’s
foot slipping from the brake and pressing the accelerator, 47 were the result of the driver pressing
the wrong pedal in a vehicle with manual transmission (either clutch or accelerator rather than the
brake, or the brake rather than the clutch). Reviewers determined the remaining 414 crashes not to
11 be the resultt of a pedal misapplication; these 519 incidents were therefore excluded from the present
analyses.
jh
No, they didn't lie or fake anything. If you go back and read the judgment you see that Top Gear was honest.
They pushed a car claiming it had run out of power into the garage when it still had considerable charge left. They admitted this in court as showing an example of "what could happen" but omitting this on the show.
If you don't consider that lying or faking that says a lot about you as a person.