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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.
slammed into the side of a building while his wife was sitting behind the wheel.
hmm ok . Happens.
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'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...
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.
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?
I know, right? It's like when Miley Cyrus gets naked and licks a sledgehammer they call it "art" and she's an "artist", but when I do it, they're all like "We're going to have to ask you to leave the hardware store" and stuff. I just don't get some people.
Maybe, but I can barely make out what you're saying because your horse is too high.
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.
Tesla lost because the judge determined the show was entertainment and not a documentary or news program and had no requirement to be factual.
They lied and faked almost the entire thing.
His suggestion was that *everyone* puts fashion before safety, and that the difference is primarily because social norms prevent males from wearing similar footwear. That you somehow interpreted it as "women are the only ones who put fashion before safety" is intriguing and rather telling.
You can't wear heals; they can only be cast by a cleric.
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.