NHTSA received a new petition alleging that a design flaw in the inverter is to blame for some or all unintended acceleration incidents involving Tesla EVs.
This seems to stem from a report where they found if one specific pin on one IC in the inverter dropped below 2V it could cause the pedal position to be read as high during that time. The claim is that the 12V rail for the vehicle could drop to 2V and trigger the issue. I don’t see how this could happen without basically the entire car either shutting down, the brief power dropout being recorded in one of many modules that log voltage, or at the very worse case the erroneous input only lasting the duration of the voltage drop. None of which would cause the claimed unintended acceleration.
The article links to a Twitter thread on this which goes into more details of those points. It is certainly good to be looking for any possible cause but this seems quite contrived. A proof of concept demonstration on an actual vehicle would be much more telling.
This seems to stem from a report where they found if one specific pin on one IC in the inverter dropped below 2V it could cause the pedal position to be read as high during that time. The claim is that the 12V rail for the vehicle could drop to 2V and trigger the issue. I don’t see how this could happen without basically the entire car either shutting down, the brief power dropout being recorded in one of many modules that log voltage, or at the very worse case the erroneous input only lasting the duration of the voltage drop. None of which would cause the claimed unintended acceleration.
The article links to a Twitter thread on this which goes into more details of those points. It is certainly good to be looking for any possible cause but this seems quite contrived. A proof of concept demonstration on an actual vehicle would be much more telling.