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.

  • @Blaat1234English
    1•1 year ago

    Well that explains why vehicle logs always show pedal misapplication, the pedal at 0% is being read out as 100% and logged as such… Unbelievable stupid mistake, a diode, capacitor and 3.3V / 1.65V (linear) regulator for just these few critical ADC lines could have prevented this nonsense for $1, even DIY/Arduino hackers know that motors need to be isolated from sensitive stuff like the CPU and especially from the analog circuits.

    • @dragontamerOPMEnglish
      1•1 year ago

      Well, potentially explains.

      It’s not proven. But it’s enough of an analysis to explain how the problem could occur. I wouldn’t say this docent rises to the level of a smoking gun.

      But we know that the vehicle logs in the French and Chinese case claimed that the pedal was pushed when it probably was not.