Sudden Unexpected Acceleration today

[Marsnaut]

I'm curious, do Teslas have the brake and accelerator closer to each other than other manufacturers?

Now that I think back, the first time I drove an S and was trying to bring it back into the garage, I accidentally hit the acceleration instead of the brake. Luckily, no contact was made as I quickly corrected the issue.

 

[kengchang]

I'm curious, do Teslas have the brake and accelerator closer to each other than other manufacturers?

Now that I think back, the first time I drove an S and was trying to bring it back into the garage, I accidentally hit the acceleration instead of the brake. Luckily, no contact was made as I quickly corrected the issue.

It is closer on the S than other car, not sure about 3

 

[Electroman]

Issue occurred while trying to park the vehicle

Hmmm.. yet another SUA when trying to park? Hmm. why is that every SUA that has been reported here as been only when the driver is pulling into a parking spot and trying to come to a full stop to park

EVERY ONE OF THEM.

This question is for OP to ponder.

 

[Flekoun]

Why every sudden acceleration case starts like this : “My wife went to shopping...she swears she haven’t done anything, it was the car’s fault!”.

I guess we all know what is going on here

 

[r0xx0r]

My recommendation for new Tesla owner: turn the CREEP mode on. It will save your car.

 

[Electroman]

Why every sudden acceleration case starts like this : “My wife went to shopping...she swears she haven’t done anything, it was the car’s fault!”.

I guess we all know what is going on here

That is so funny, because it so TRUE.

 

[cwerdna]

Most cases of “unintended acceleration” don’t start with the driver applying “full pressure” to the pedal. The driver applies light pressure to what she believes is the brake pedal but is actually the accelerator. Instead of slowing the vehicle accelerates, which causes the driver to immediately press the pedal harder,again believing she is pressing the brake but actually pressing the accelerator. Understand that this all occurs in a second or two, there is no time to think “gee, am I really pressing the brake pedal?” It’s a mistake that occurs more often than people realize, and all of the drivers believe they were pressing the brake. People make mistakes, it is what it is. Just be glad no one was injured, fix the car, and move on.

Smart pedals won’t put the brakes on driver error mentions this, but also, to quote from there, a possible reason

First, in these situations, the driver does not really confuse the accelerator and the brake. Rather, the limbs do not do exactly what the brain tells them to. Noisy neuromuscular processes intervene to make the action slightly different from the one intended. The driver intends to press the brake, but once in a while these neuromuscular processes cause the foot to deviate from the intended trajectory — just as a basketball player who makes 90 percent of his free throws sometimes misses the hoop. This effect would be enhanced by the driver being slightly misaligned in the seat when he first gets in the car.

and further back in that piece was this

Back then, many of us who worked in fields like ergonomics, human performance and psychology suspected that these unintended-acceleration events might have a human component. We noticed that the complaints were far more frequent among older drivers (in a General Motors study, 60-to-70-year-olds had about six times the rate of complaints as 20-to-30-year-olds), drivers who had little experience with the specific car involved (parking-lot attendants, car-wash workers, rental-car patrons) and people of relatively short stature.

 

[Canuck]

I admire the OP. His post proves to me that he's deeply in love with his wife since, as we all know, love is blind.

 

[MikeBur]

Sorry to hear. Hope your wife is doing better and speedy repair.

My recommendation for new Tesla owner: turn the CREEP mode on. It will save your car.

Teslas can have creep on, so this is something you may want to disable once the new owner understands implications..

Tesla changed behavior 3+ years ago that braking disables ability to accelerate.

Pulling CAN bus data from logs is only way to be sure; as mentioned there are multiply-redundant systems here, though I fully believe your wife believes she hit brake.

 

[Tam]

What happened to AEB?

The manual says Tesla AEB does not apply brakes to a complete stop. It only does so to reduce speed. So if AEB works, you should expect a collision. Not a full force collision but a lesser force collision.

However, Tesla AEB is designed to obey human's overriding actions. So if there's any action on the pedal such as accelerator, the AEB will comply to human's overriding accelerating action.

Manual steering would also disable Tesla AEB to not interfering with human skills.

Thus, for current design, I would not rely on Tesla AEB!

 

[Tam]

The car has the creep ON.

I don't see there's any help in Creep On or Creep Off because this happens in all makes and models of cars and not just Tesla.

I would recommend to drive with bare feet first to feel the difference between accelerator and brake pedal.

Because of their positions, the chance of hitting accelerator is the default because it takes more effort to find a brake pedal which is higher from the floor.

 

[RedModel3]

FUD. The woman driver stepped on the gas, and the logs will prove it.

EXCUSE ME??? Here, allow me to edit this correctly. "The driver stepped on the gas."

See how easy that was to not piss off half of the population?

 

[hacer]

Yes, Tesla has recently released EDR tools for the users to pull logs from their cars. The tools are expensive ($995) so I am not sure how many owners would want to own one.

I don't think its about keeping secrets, however I am not convinced that every instance of so-called pedal misapplication or sudden acceleration is attributable to a user error. It's easy to blame the other person until it happens to you.

What I find peculiar in most of the reported incidents is that they happened when you are about to park. It is odd to think that a driver whose familiar with an electric car's automatic slowing while regen braking would suddenly apply full pressure to the "brake pedal" to slow the car from 2-5 mph to zero.

You know at 2-5 mph regen pretty much does nothing to slow the car, at least for Tesla. Some other brands will "regen" to a complete stop, but they actually have to actively use energy rather than recapture it once the car is going very slow. Tesla opted to save power and require that you use the friction brake for the last little bit.

So an experienced Tesla driver would know that they must apply the brake to slow the car to a complete stop. It only requires light pressure, but light pressure on the throttle will quickly accelerate the car to 10-15 causing a fear reaction (because this is a parking space, and there is something you will crash into) that can result in "panic" brake force. Unfortunately if you believe your foot is already on the brake (even though it isn't) it will be panic flooring it instead. That is the classic pedal misapplication scenario.

 

[hacer]

... M3 has no ability to turn off creep.

This is NOT true. It is a driver profile setting on the M3. I have mine set to creep off in the model 3, and my wife has it set to creep on in her profile. Look at the bottom right on this picture:

 

[S3XY]

There was an episode on the excellent podcast "Revisionist History" that looked into the famous Toyota throttle issues. Further investigation revealed that it was unintentional user error by stomping on the wrong pedal.

My 80-something year old dad was part of this. He reported UA in his Corolla during the height of that investigation. He didn't have an accident but the car unexpectedly accellerated in traffic. They had him bring in his car so they could test it but found nothing wrong. Several months later my dad damaged a fence in a parking lot while parking. He/we knew he had hit the wrong pedal. We took away his keys and sold the car shortly after. So I'm obviously on the user error side of this.

 

[smartypnz]

Bad pedal!!! Bad, bad pedal!!! Now go to your room!

 

[bonnie]

On the bright side, the damage doesn't look too bad compared to others where misapplication of the throttle caused a crash.

The car does log the voltage of both potentiometers that measure the throttle pedal position - one of them increases in voltage as the pedal is applied, the other decreases in voltage. It is a redundant anti-symmetrical system so If the logs show both agree on a time-increasing pedal depression the there really is no other plausible explanation than that the throttle was mistakenly pressed when the brake was intended.

If you don't believe Tesla's reading of the log, you can hire Jason (@wk057) to pull your logs (not sure he can do that with the 3 yet).

@AZM3 - This post is spot on. The Model 3 has the same redundant system as the Model S and Model X. I'm sure your wife is absolutely sure that it isn't use error, but I have no doubt that will be the cause. Take the suggestion of having @wk057 take a look - you'll have to give him access to the logs, but an independent opinion might reassure you that use error is the cause.

Sorry for the damage.

 

[bonnie]

Most cases of “unintended acceleration” don’t start with the driver applying “full pressure” to the pedal. The driver applies light pressure to what she believes is the brake pedal but is actually the accelerator. Instead of slowing the vehicle accelerates, which causes the driver to immediately press the pedal harder,again believing she is pressing the brake but actually pressing the accelerator. Understand that this all occurs in a second or two, there is no time to think “gee, am I really pressing the brake pedal?” It’s a mistake that occurs more often than people realize, and all of the drivers believe they were pressing the brake. People make mistakes, it is what it is. Just be glad no one was injured, fix the car, and move on.

Yep - and with the instant torque of an EV, it feels like the car is taking over. No engine revving, just full torque as you press the 'not the brake pedal' even harder, trying to stop.

 

[voip-ninja]

Nearly every make and model of car has reported incidents of unintended acceleration.
It is rarely attributed to mechanical failure.
Pressing the wrong pedal is #1.
Incorrectly installed floormat is #2.

Unless 60 minutes gets ahold of it, fakes a case of "unintended acceleration" and nearly runs your company out of business in the US for 10 years as a result of brainwashing the public into believing your cars are faulty.

 

[wk057]

@AZM3 - This post is spot on. The Model 3 has the same redundant system as the Model S and Model X. I'm sure your wife is absolutely sure that it isn't use error, but I have no doubt that will be the cause. Take the suggestion of having @wk057 take a look - you'll have to give him access to the logs, but an independent opinion might reassure you that use error is the cause.

Sorry for the damage.

More "unexpected" acceleration stuff... ugh.

Ok, first, the Model 3 logs are physically accessible on the logging SD card in the car PC, which is slightly less inaccessible than in the S/X. I've copied my own a while ago, and they're very similar to the S/X, although lots of IDs are redone. So, wouldn't be too difficult to check this with physical access to the car.

That said....... please just don't bother.

I just recently finished what I believe is my tenth private investigation of cases of "unexpected" acceleration in a Tesla where the owners have claimed the car accelerated on its own and they didn't press the pedal, yada yada.

Every single instance has shown that the accelerator pedal was physically pressed to the floor (or nearly) during the event. This is monitored by 100Hz reporting of the two sensors in the pedal by two independent systems (a "pedal monitor" and "drive inverter cross-check", only changes are logged... and this actually used to be 10Hz logging, but Tesla bumped it up probably in response to claims like this). If it were an electronic issue or the car just decided to massively accelerate on its own somehow (not actually possible, for the record), the curve of both sensors would not match perfectly with baseline logs of me mashing my own pedal. In every case I investigated the four logging points for pedal position changes matched perfectly with a physical pedal doing the exact same action. Every. Single. One.

After being unequivocally proven, the parties contracting me to somehow exonerate them have essentially begged me to not stand by my stance of publicly posting the data or sharing it with anyone. (If you may recall, I've offered to investigate such instances free of charge in exchange for the rights to basically do whatever I want with the data, including posting in relevant threads or stories.) Out of respect for those involved, I've honored such requests.

So, sorry for your accident, OP, but it's just not the car's fault. End of story.

Long story short, I think I'm going to stop wasting time on such investigations.