How different is this from any other similar sized companies behaviour?
This site doesn't seem that impartial/unbiased. From a linked article on Tesla:
> It’s also worth noting that the above email was sent after 2 a.m. Pacific, which isn’t specifically relevant to the faked video. But it does make it look like Musk is a loser with no friends or anything else to do other than work. Loser.
Every customer complaint about unintended acceleration of Teslas was proven in court to be the fault of the customer confusing the pedals. The accelerator pedal has two independent sensors measuring input - they both have to agree, and no input on the brake pedal must be detected for the vehicle to accelerate.
They go a step further. They use their cameras to detect the environment and significantly slow down acceleration if they think it might be a mistake.
It was the same with Toyota too. Car and Driver did an article and summarized the unintended acceleration cases and it turned out most people were intoxicated. Same thing with Audi back in the early 90s. People were pressing the wrong pedals and blaming the car. Audi still lost and Toyota still lost.
1. Most unintended acceleration events are user error across all vehicles.
2. Some small number of Toyota unintended acceleration events were caused by low quality software on the ECU and a very badly implemented watchdog that did not implement brake override or other safety measures.
Instead, what was shown in court was that Toyota had a culture of firmware engineering that produced code impossible to consistently QC, debug, test or verify. And as a result, they quietly fired the directors of that department, rebuilt it from scratch, and replaced every TCU from that era with a re-engineered unit in a series of about a dozen recalls spanning a decade and millions of vehicles.
you're right, thanks for pointing that out... got confused by another reply in this thread, and whenever I see "unintended acceleration" I think "toyota" and the names kinda look alike. Too late to edit my comment.
Teslas have a problem with phantom braking (e.g. when there's a dark shadow it fails to detect that it's a shadow before going from ~70mph to ~55mph). Myself and countless friends I know have experienced it but that problem has yet to be solved.
A lot of cars with automated emergency braking have problems with phantom braking. This is an elephant in a room that hasn't been opened yet, but eventually will be.
Like others have said, this would be less of a problem if Tesla relied on LIDAR like others. Tesla uniquely has this problem that's unsolveable because it's relying on cameras only.
I drive a Tesla day to day (with the latest FSD Beta) - yes, phantom breaking was real - but it's been almost completely remedied for the past few months in my opinion - and I'd be shocked if other automakers (as was mentioned above also have these problems) are as quick to iterate based on feedback.
Autonomous driving companies are using LiDAR but almost every consumer passenger vehicle is relying on a vision based system, and they all have this problem. Look behind the windshield of every car you walk past :D
Would you have a link to that? I'd be interested to look.
As a side note, I've never heard of confusing the pedals as an issue for ANY car, so if Telsa's get people to confuse them enough to bring them to court, it's probably bad design.
Edit: The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimates 16,000 accidents per year in the United States occur when drivers intend to apply the brake but mistakenly apply the accelerator.[3] from wikipedia on Sudden unintended acceleration
> As a side note, I've never heard of confusing the pedals as an issue for ANY car
Then you haven't been paying attention around the Toyota acceleration scandal.
Pedal confusion is remarkably common when you buy a new car/use a rental (your feet rely on muscle memory), and it's not uncommon in the elderly.
Most of the Toyota unintended acceleration fits the statistical profile of pedal confusion in the elderly.
However, what Toyota really got whacked for is that when people pulled their software for audit, the software was a disaster and didn't even adhere to basic standards. At that point, it was cheaper for Toyota to just admit fault than go through with a whole lot of court cases that they were likely to lose once a jury got involved.
When skimming about Toyota, I'm getting unsafe floor mats and sticky pedals as the cause of acceleration, but maybe I'm not looking hard enough. The other commenter also brought up that it's a common issue.
Guess I'm feeling less safe on the road then ever - and I'll get a manual to boot
If memory serves the main ECU control loop didn't check for stack overflows so excessive recursion could smash the global variables on the stack and accidentally turn off any number of ECU tasks - including the one responsible for monitoring the accelerator and brake.
The ECU module includes watchdog support that runs on another chip or core (can't recall) that was intended to do backup monitoring of the main ECU - and especially it should have watched the brake pedal and of the brake was held for a minimum time it would override the ECU and force the accelerator to zero. However that function did not work reliably, making the watchdog useless.
The code itself was poorly structured, with lots of critical things done in one big "god" task that if accidentally disabled by a single bool flip in RAM would ultimately disable many safety critical functions. Normally you'd have multiple copies of such data structures that must agree, split the code up into separate isolated tasks so a failure of one doesn't stop the others, and implement basic stack overflow protection which again IIRC was available on the toolchain they were using but was not enabled.
The watchdog problems are especially inexcusable for a safety critical system.
I've definitely had a few instances (over a few decades of driving) when I lost confidence in my knowledge of which pedal was which. Rote knowledge is tricky that way. Fortunately, I was always able to safely test. I was never confidently incorrect, but I can see it from here. It's a scary thought.
It was famously a problem for Audi in the 1980’s and almost destroyed the brand. I thought everyone had heard of that.
But it is one of the most common if not the most common cause of unintended acceleration in any car.
I’ve even had it happen to me one time. The typical scenario is that you’re traveling at low (“creep”) speed with your foot on (but not pressing) the gas pedal. You think your foot is on the brake, so you push to slow down… whoops you’re starting to accelerate.
The probable reason that it happens more often with Teslas is that they have less lag between pressing the accelerator and getting juice. So by the time you realize you messed up, you’re already going fast.
In most gas cars, firmly pressing the accelerator results in milquetoast acceleration and a lot of noise for a second while the transmission downshifts and the engine revs up. In an EV, you just… go.
> As a side note, I've never heard of confusing the pedals as an issue for ANY car, so if Telsa's get people to confuse them enough to bring them to court, it's probably bad design.
I think this is media bias. The media picks up accidents involving Teslas far more often than they do other manufacturers. The national news will even cover Tesla recalls when it's just an over-the-air software patch with zero known real-world impact), and similarly despite that there are ~25K vehicle fires per year, you only see them in the media when a Tesla is involved. In particular, confusing pedals is pretty common, particularly among very old drivers.
It happens all the time. People panic and mash their foot to the floor. Some old guy crashed into 6 cars down the street from my work through a parking lot, and jumped his car across the alley and though the wall of my office into our break room. He just panicked and thought he was mashing the brakes. Luckily nobody was in the break room.
I think it's more that if someone does it in a Tesla, it makes for good headlines and generates clicks, so we hear about it. Someone in my hometown confused the pedals in an ICE car a few years ago, made a small blurb in our tiny newspaper, nowhere else. Same with cars catching on fire. Happens all the time, but when it happens to a Tesla, you see it in the national news.
I was kinda scared, or at least on edge, during the Toyota stuff; I usually have a very level head about this stuff but for some reason that one got me. But if it happened again, I wouldn't really blink an eye.
The leak can be real, but the narrative around the leak is important.
My read from this link to a story about a story:
~1000 crashes related to autopilot reported for the 2.6 million autopilot enabled vehicles shipped in the reported time frame.
.04% total failures. How many of these were user created and not the fault of the car? How many of the failures from the car were specific to that cars hardware vs the software? Was it a Tesla hardware failure or an OEM device failure?
I’m not gonna do a full analysis, but whenever I re contextualize myself on car crash statistics I am reminded that Tesla failures represent an insignificant fraction of all failures.
I think you meant 'biased' and not 'impartial'. I am not being pedantic; I don't want your sentence to have the wrong meaning so I am bringing it to your attention if that is the case.
The report being on a site with a bias does make me want to read with a more critical eye, as everything is being spun to look as bad as possible.
The behaviour described (not wanting anything written) might very well be standard operating procedure with any company with decent legal counsel. If it is common behaviour, it is not some sort of Muskism, part of his evil scheming as is implied in the article, instead it is a reflection of the world we live in.
If you can find the same information to corroborate then no, but if it's the only source...
But it is one of those trends that I personally do not like either where these posts are made like it's a personal conversation between two girlfriends or whatever. There's opinion pieces and then there's this kind of I don't even know what it's called I'm so un-hip
They only refer to a respected German business newspaper which seems to have reasonable journalism.
That doesn't mean that those journalists are necessarily completely unbiased. Germany's traditional car industry is threatened by Tesla without any doubt.
However, the details on how Tesla is handling these reports is revealing and I have no doubts that they are real. That those who publish them might not like Tesla does not change that.
This site doesn't seem that impartial/unbiased. From a linked article on Tesla:
> It’s also worth noting that the above email was sent after 2 a.m. Pacific, which isn’t specifically relevant to the faked video. But it does make it look like Musk is a loser with no friends or anything else to do other than work. Loser.