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

    Fair enough, yeah. I still think the only way this gets any real traction is for a lawyer to hire an engineering team to reproduce this work on the bench and on a vehicle. I’m not sure how you do the latter safely without modifying the boards or modifying the 12v subsystem. Obviously monitoring the +12v bus is easy enough, but the impact of calibration during a low power event would have to be orchestrated carefully.