Sudden Unexpected Acceleration today

[Marsnaut]

I understand that we should all be skeptics considering the world we live in but I'm sure the OP understands that this incident could have been an accident and not the car's fault. The topic has been fleshed out for 8 pages and blaming each other serves no purpose.

We should wait until he gets back with a definitive answer rather than mindlessly speculating.

 

[Runt8]

Thanks, I’ll be sure to cancel my order right away and buy a Range Rover. Frickin Elon With his cars driving people into other cars all the time. It hasn’t happened to me yet after 25,000 miles but now after reading your post, I know it’s roulette. Time to cancel my order and sell my car. Thanks again.

He'll do it!

I understand that we should all be skeptics considering the world we live in but I'm sure the OP understands that this incident could have been an accident and not the car's fault. The topic has been fleshed out for 8 pages and blaming each other serves no purpose.

We should wait until he gets back with a definitive answer rather than mindlessly speculating.

Tesla gave him a definitive answer, it was back in the original post. The accelerator was pressed.

 

[slipnslider]

What makes you think this? Plenty of Toyotas, Audis, etc ICEs have had SUA, I dare say in much higher numbers. Their cars always Creep, because they are automatics. Why does their creeping not prevent SUA but a Tesla's lack of creeping causes it?

Because without creep you can totally take your foot off all pedals and relax. Then when you press back down, you can hit the wrong pedal. With creep, you always know which pedal your foot is on.

 

[mal_tsla]

Because without creep you can totally take your foot off all pedals and relax. Then when you press back down, you can hit the wrong pedal. With creep, you always know which pedal your foot is on.

And yet, an Audi with always-on creep experiences SUA just like any other car.

We'll have SUA as long as we have human drivers.

 

[jpaz]

Related (but unrelated) is my inadvertent click of the small stalk in my S (the one associated with AP and Cruise) instead of the turn signal which caused surprise unintended acceleration while changing lanes. This made me a whole lot more careful when activating the turn signal. I felt the car speed up and immediately touched the brake before I understood what happened. Obviously driver error but I wonder about the placement of the controls and the lack of an "on off switch" for cruise control which, while adding a step to activating the mode, would prevent any inadvertent signal telling the car to accelerate.

 

[drawfour]

Related (but unrelated) is my inadvertent click of the small stalk in my S (the one associated with AP and Cruise) instead of the turn signal which caused surprise unintended acceleration while changing lanes. This made me a whole lot more careful when activating the turn signal. I felt the car speed up and immediately touched the brake before I understood what happened. Obviously driver error but I wonder about the placement of the controls and the lack of an "on off switch" for cruise control which, while adding a step to activating the mode, would prevent any inadvertent signal telling the car to accelerate.

I have a similar issue with my Acura MDX. I've had multiple times where all of a sudden, cruise control was activated and increasing my speed. Luckily, there never was a car immediately in front of me, and I was able to tap the brake to disengage. So I end up just leaving it turned completely off at the button on the dash, instead of leaving that enabled and activating it via the steering wheel controls.

As I think about it some more, I bet I was accidentally touching "Resume" on the steering wheel without realizing it, probably due to adjusting my hand position or something.

 

[nvx1977]

One adaptation I've made (no clue when I made it; must have been early on in my driving history) is to keep the heel of my right foot planted under the brake no matter which pedal I apply. This keeps my foot in a natural position when braking and a less natural one when accelerating. This gives me additional feedback on which pedal I'm currently on. If my foot is turned way outward, I know I'm on the accelerator. I never lift the heel off the floor unless I'm using cruise control. In an emergency situation, I press down on the pedal under my heel after rotating my foot back to neutral.

For those of you who can play guitar, this is kind of like pivot fingers. Basically when you change chords, you don't lift fingers off strings unnecessarily. It gives you good reference points for where your fingers are and where to place your other fingers. The heel is like the pivot finger.

 

[Eclectic]

This happened a few hours ago near me. Model X barreled into the front of the bank. I bet the owner will claim unintended acceleration. I bet the logs will show the accelerator was pressed.

 

[buttershrimp]

This happened a few hours ago near me. Model X barreled into the front of the bank. I bet the owner will claim unintended acceleration. I bet the logs will show the accelerator was pressed.
View attachment 299542

Ouch.... now that's what I call breaking the bank!

 

[AZM3]

This happened a few hours ago near me. Model X barreled into the front of the bank. I bet the owner will claim unintended acceleration. I bet the logs will show the accelerator was pressed.
View attachment 299542

And I bet this will continue until we either change Driver behavior or find what’s really causing these misinterpreted pedals and clear the gremlins in our brains or the car. Why do we not see that there’s a pattern and there might be a burden or responsibility that has to be shared between drivers and car manufacturers?

 

[buttershrimp]

ATM fees get on my nerves too.

 

[buttershrimp]

This happened a few hours ago near me. Model X barreled into the front of the bank. I bet the owner will claim unintended acceleration. I bet the logs will show the accelerator was pressed.
View attachment 299542

But it said on the new maps that this Bank of America was a drive through location!

 

[buttershrimp]

This happened a few hours ago near me. Model X barreled into the front of the bank. I bet the owner will claim unintended acceleration. I bet the logs will show the accelerator was pressed.
View attachment 299542

AEB - Automatic Emergency Banking

 

[buttershrimp]

His Model X has Enhanced Auto-debit

 

[buttershrimp]

This happened a few hours ago near me. Model X barreled into the front of the bank. I bet the owner will claim unintended acceleration. I bet the logs will show the accelerator was pressed.
View attachment 299542

Reverse Mortgage my ass.

 

[brkaus]

Without reading the entire thread, I think I have a solution to the majority of these cases....

Tesla has already implemented some code for accidental pedal applications but I wonder if they could implement an optional parking lot guard tied to autopilot hardware.

Imagine if the user decides to enable this option then the car will detect if the vehicle is currently in a parking lot, or even as small an area as a parking spot itself. If so, then it would display a status message on the screen in addition to both dramatically limit the power available in the area and cause the car to be reluctant to cross white parking lines or cement curbs.

It already has parking spot detection, so this would be relatively trivial to implement, one would think. It would help prevent accidents like this but also shouldn't interfere when acceleration is truly desired.

Thoughts?

I’d be afraid of mapping the pedal power curve differently based in circumstances. There will be a time it doesn’t identify the parking spot appropriately and the pedal is pushed harder due to “parking mode” and result in an accident.

I was hoping to have heard from Tesla by now regarding the log report. I am very curious what they find. In general I have not found auto park to be a reliable feature, with the P coming on randomly in stop and go traffic on the highway, and on city streets when there are no obvious parking spaces, just lines of cars, so I really never use it. It just so happens that the day before the incident I got the auto park notification as I was backing into a similar parking space, so for the heck of I let it take over the final part of the parking and it worked fine. Not so the following day. I have turned it of completely since then. My car was just in for its one year tune up about 6 weeks ago btw, I would hope checking the sensors was part of the service.

The P sometimes comes on when slowing down for lights because it is mapping the gap between the moving cars in the next one as much wider.

Think of this example - on the highway there is are two cars in the lane to your left. One with its back bumper just in front of your front bumper. Another slightly behind, it’s front bumper just behind your back bumper.

To someone looking straight out the side, it’s a very long parallel parking spot.

And I bet this will continue until we either change Driver behavior or find what’s really causing these misinterpreted pedals and clear the gremlins in our brains or the car. Why do we not see that there’s a pattern and there might be a burden or responsibility that has to be shared between drivers and car manufacturers?

Too much performance and no noise. Most cars have much slower acceleration response and they make a loud noise as the engine revs up indicating user is doing something stupid.

Put it in chill mode. Everyone does not need supercar performance.

No, I don’t use chill mode. I should, but won’t

 

[thecloud]

Perhaps they chose this bank because it provides higher charge rates to its customers?

 

[Tozz]

Call Tesla, tell them what happened, give them a time stamp and ask for the logs to be pulled and analyzed and report back.

and make public apologies.

I've now also read about the Chevy Bolt case (here: Chevy Bolt Crashed On Its Own, Says Owner - ChevroletForum ). What I thought was interesting is that, and this is especially the case with the Chevy, is that the UA seems to have stopped right after the Chevy parked in the wooden cabinet. With "Chevy parked" I mean "wife parked".

The same goes for this M3 incident.

If the car would _really_ drive itself, why would it stop right after it hit some wooden cabinet. Why would it stop after it hit a concrete wall? Both cars (the Chevy and the M3) have only minor damage, not the kind of damage that would, for example, trigger airbags.

All these incidents that start with "my wife" and "the car suddenly drove" all seem relatively minor in damage. All incidents I could find about serious damage / deaths are all related to actual issues with the car, such as the Toyota floormat issue.

 

[SlicedBr3ad]

That's definitely not true. Are you on really old firmware? If your car doesn't allow you to turn off Creep, you probably want to get it checked out. Also, Creep was off by default when I took delivery of my car. My delivery specialist specifically pointed out that it comes with Creep disabled and asked me if I wanted to enable it while we were doing the UI walkthrough to give more of the feel of a traditional car.

Just took delivery, creep was definitely default set to on.

 

[SlicedBr3ad]

There are enough differences between EVs and ICE Vehicle driving characteristics, that negative transference is an issue if you swap between the two. Especially if someone is primarily and AT ICE driver, and only occasionally drives the EV. I highly recommend you make the transition as easy as possible for the driver who only rarely drives the Tesla:
- Chill mode - ON
- Regen - LOW
- Creep - ON
I’m making a separate “Guest Driver” profile, and ensuring these settings are there for my wife’s profile. KISS.

I would even add following recommendation for new EV drivers, steering set to comfort
in addition to those other things.