I've no doubt the accelerator pedal and the hardware is solid, but the car is eventually commanded to accelerate by software. This is evident because there is no physical movement of the pedal when accelerating under cruise control, autopilot, and summon.
How can we independently audit the software path? There is more complexity in software than hardware and I expect more room for unintended behavior.
I was always in the camp of "it's always pedal misapplication" but a few months ago, my father also claimed unintended acceleration (close, but no collision) in his Model 3 and the car had some strange software behavior immediately afterward (unable to lock vehicle). I guessed it was unintended activation of cruise control (default to speed limit), but Tesla came back with 100% accelerator pedal position for 1 sec.
Now I'm left with wondering how granular is Tesla's logging and does it log each of the raw pedal position channels or just the final interpreted position? That makes a huge difference in how believable the logs are at capturing the physical position of the pedals. Have you actually seen what the logs log? And at what frequency?
Knowing this would definitely help me settle it in my own mind. In the mean time, I'm a bit more cautious and hyper-aware of my own foot position when pulling up to my daughter's elementary school in the mornings.
Tesla's logging is ridiculously thorough. Last I saw they were logging changes in both tracks of the accelerator position at up to 100Hz while the vehicle is in gear. Same with the brake pedal switch (also dual and redundant).
As for the software, all of the autonomous functions have interlocks that prevent usage at high torque command. You're not going to see a car summon at more than a couple feet per second because this is limited and crosschecked by multiple pieces of hardware. Cruise control has a defined max rate of increase in speed which is crosschecked in multiple places as well. Full acceleration by any autonomous feature is not possible.
The autonomous functions never show in logs as a pedal application, either. While cruising or summoning, if your foot is off the pedal the logged position is 0. If the logs say the pedal was pressed you can rest assured that the pedal is pressed.
Also, internally, the pedal position is measured thousands of times per second. It won't accept an instantaneous change from 0 to 100% without intermediate increases in position matching real world usage. Even if you do the fastest kung fu speed kick at the pedal from 0 to 100% the hardware will get multiple data points in between as it changes from 0 to 100% and can know for certain that it was indeed a physical pedal press.
As noted, I've actually been working to achieve a software-based control over acceleration for a while now. I literally want to launch my S down a drag strip via remote. Making this possible has been extremely difficult due to all of the safety crosschecks Tesla has put in place for throttle control. Seriously, I'm putting considerable effort into a hardware/software solution to try and get the car to do basically a full acceleration without a human pressing the pedal. There are so many safety interlocks to defeat, both hardware and software wise, that I've benched the project multiple times in frustration. I only recently managed to achieve some limited success with the project. I can assure you and everyone else that this is one area where Tesla really did their due diligence to make their control system safe and reliable. Kudos.
Edit: Also will note, the accelerator pedal can not be commanded to physically move. Unlike the brake pedal, there is no physical connection to anything that can be commanded to move. It's just a sensor.
If you look at my post history, you'll see I'm the last one to give Tesla a pass on something and probably the last person to defend Tesla on anything at all without a solid basis for doing so.
This one really just needs to be put to rest. But, humans will human it seems. On a broader view, our culture has definitely been moving away from people accepting personal responsibility for themselves and their actions (or inactions) and more towards baseless finger pointing, and passing the buck, and an overall "gimme gimme gimme but I'm not going to work for it, I can do no wrong, and it's always someone else's fault" type of attitude. It's depressing and makes me fear for upcoming generations.
Accept responsibility for your actions, and move on.
