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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...
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."