this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2023
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Breaking: NHTSA Petition Claims Tesla Sudden Unintended Acceleration Is Real (but Fixable) (www.autoevolution.com)
submitted 1 year ago by dragontamer@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world
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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/1030687

EDIT: This PDF contains very detailed electrical information for the EEs who wanna go through the complaint: https://www.autoevolution.com/pdf/news_attachements/breaking-nhtsa-petition-shows-tesla-s-sudden-unintended-acceleration-is-real-and-curable-217525.pdf

Last year at /r/RealTesla, a Chinese video of a car rocketing at full speed for 1+ minutes before crashing / killing a pedestrian made the rounds. We all recognized it as one of the weirder cases of "Sudden Unintended Acceleration", and I think that particular video really changed some minds.

https://www.republicworld.com/world-news/china/tesla-to-assist-police-probe-fatal-model-y-acceleration-incident-in-china-articleshow.html

While a lot of SUA events are from driver-error, it began a search into why Teslas seemed to be getting more SUA above-and-beyond the industry normal. This investigation (now filed under NHTSA) suggests that the ADC could be miscalibrated during a load-dump (or other electrical surge-like) scenario.

If the ADC associated with the accelerator pedal is off, then the Tesla will have the pedal at the wrong level of acceleration until the next calibration event, which is not going to happen until over a minute later.

This is extremely similar to that Chinese runaway Tesla, and perfectly seems to explain it. I'm glad that someone seems to have gotten to the bottom of this.

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[–] dragontamer@lemmy.world 16 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

As I said in my post, one community I follow (RealTesla) keeps track of this. Years ago there was this French case: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-12-16/why-the-ev-world-should-worry-about-unintended-acceleration

And several other cases over the years, the Chinese case I linked above being one of the more recent ones I remember personally.

This report changes everything. All of these events were dismissed by Tesla engineers recovering the black box and saying that the pedal was pushed the whole time.

Alas, we now know that when the ADC miscalibrates, the Tesla computer thinks (for a few minutes) that the computer thinks the accelerator is pressed even when it isn't pressed in reality. This complaint is very enlightening, we cannot trust the Tesla telematics / logs. The computer is wrong at the fundamental analog level before the data even leaves the ADC.