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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.
Not being funny...
but if the logs show 100% acceleration, that just reflects the sensor value. Not that the user - or indeed anything else like a dropped handbag - actually pressed the pedal that far.
Although I'm always the one to shout "user error" first, and that's quite likely in this case, the logs alone are not sufficient to prove fault. Only to act like a flight recorder and say what the sensors recorded and what the machine did in response to that input.
How the sensor got that reading could still be manufacturing fault, cable fatigue, or a million and one other things not the fault of the driver.
I did this a few weeks ago.... I was driving along a fairly empty road and had to go past a parked vehicle, so I tapped the brake and to my horror the car went faster! I realised afterwards that I'd been driving for a while and I wasn't sitting completely straight to the wheel, so my feet weren't aligned with the pedals. Then I moved my foot across, too far, and now I was punching between the clutch and the brake (pressing both pedals, but weirdly because they have different pressures) - nothing was working, total madness! It was dark and i couldn't see my feet, and I sailed past the parked car at speed before I finally realigned and got back in control.
Whereupon I straightened myself up, slowed down, and spent the rest of the journey muttering shit...shit...! It'd never happened before, I didn't even consider it a risk. Scary.
Serious question... is this open information that the driver or owner of the car can read, or is this super secret encoded info that only Tesla has access to?
Do we simply take their word for what the logs say? Is there any way to check via 3rd party that this is in fact what happened and there is a secure means of ensuring the data isn't changed?
This is important, sooner or later it'll end up in court and this will come up. "Trust us" is not an answer.
Come on, do you really think their own actual technical logs showed exactly 100%? They saw some value which may or may not be anywhere near "100" and translated it to a human-understandable "100% throttle" meaning "the pedal was pushed all the way down".
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.
The problem is that the sensors are recording what happens but not why it happens. The sensor can say that the throttle was 100% but it doesn't actually record the movement of a biological leg and foot - it assumes it.
Toyota has recalled cars because of the gas pedal sticking. If that were to happen in a tesla, the sensors would show the throttle going to 100% and would blame the driver when in fact the car was at fault.
http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/...
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
That was my question exactly.
Why does no one object when I place a camera on the floor of a factory for safety reasons?
But everybody gets hysterical when I place that same camera in the employee toilet looking directly at the employees taking a dump?
What's up with that?
If it was culturally acceptable for males to wear heals once more, I can guarantee those numbers would be a lot more even.
Reminds me of unintended acceleration in Audi 5000s: drivers swore that the vehicle accelerated at full power while they had their foot hard on the brake. Of course, their foot was in fact on the accelerator.
Sudden unintended acceleration#Audi_5000.
Eventually a motoring journalist did the obvious experiment: what happens when you press both pedals at once? At speed or at rest, the brakes won.
Design was a factor: the brake and accelerator were sized and positioned so as to make this mistake easier to make in the Audi 5000 compared to many other cars.
I've only ever owned manual transmission cars. I've always liked the ability to feather the engine or disconnect it from the wheels entirely. Even today, the clutch and manual transmission are almost always mechanical assemblies, not fly-by-wire. When Toyota was having all those issues with unintended acceleration, I'll admit that I felt smug, knowing that I had the ability to disconnect the engine, coupled with decades of experience that makes depressing the clutch instinctual.
For various reasons, my next car is likely to be a plug-in hybrid or pure electric. I'm going to miss that capability.
If it's like my Honda Civic, "drive by wire," then there is a simple sealed variable resistor installed at the pedal lever. If one wire fails, the encoding ADC will either swing to the top or the bottom of the range. There really isn't a "throttle body" in an electric car.
So it is still possible that the throttle encoding circuit/wires failed and the computer logged a "full press" even though it wasn't pressed at all.
If it actually logged 512 or whatever the max is, I wonder if a normal press of the pedal could have achieved full scale? Maybe.
> The car was 5 days old, it takes more time than that to become intimately familiar with the car.
This is a key piece. I was astonished when I bought a new car how different everything felt for a few weeks. I'd had the old car for 12 years and everything was second nature in it but it takes a while to get used to a new vehicle's layout and handling.