New information received by the NHTSA shows that sudden unintended acceleration events with Tesla EVs were real and not driver errors. The report explain...

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.

  • Dr. DabblesEnglish
    1•1 year ago

    Ok, double comment time. So, reviewing this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDYbvI32OBE

    At 2:27 he pans across the EPAS module and the BATT1 and BATT2 connectors look exactly the same to me. They are not HVDC cables with the typical bright orange sheath, but rather just red and black. I think this is just two 12v sources. One is likely the DC/DC converter and the other is likely the battery. But for sure there’s no HV connection here and there’s no secondary battery source, it would actually just be that DC/DC converter being called “batt2”.

    Odd design, but here we are. I’m positive there’s no secondary 12v source here and that it’s just feeding from “redundant” controller boards and everything feeds through the 12v battery. But I’m just open to the possibility there might be two sources on the body controllers. Again, all would be sourced from the battery and the DC/DC converter would feed through it, but that battery is in the way of all of this and is not actually redundant at all.