Tesla: Model X Accident Caused By Driver Error, Not Autopilot (computerworld.com) 596
An anonymous reader writes: Tesla has responded to a recent report from a Model X owner claiming their vehicle suddenly accelerated at "maximum speed" by itself, jumped a curb and slammed into the side of a building while his wife was sitting behind the wheel. They said it analyzed vehicle logs, "which confirm that this Model X was operating correctly under manual control and was never in Autopilot or cruise control at the time of the incident or in the minutes before. Data shows that the vehicle was traveling at 6 mph when the accelerator pedal was abruptly increased to 100%. Consistent with the driver's action, the vehicle applied torque and accelerated as instructed. Safety is the top priority at Tesla and we engineer and build our cars with this foremost in mind. We are pleased that the driver is ok and ask our customers to exercise safe behavior when using our vehicles." When will people stop lying about Tesla's Autopilot mode crashing their cars? One Tesla owner recently filed a Lemon Law claim against the company over a high number of quality control issues.
No one hurt . (Score:5, Funny)
slammed into the side of a building while his wife was sitting behind the wheel.
hmm ok . Happens.
Re:No one hurt . (Score:5, Informative)
You may laugh, but, from the actual article:
"researchers found that there were seven to 15 crashes per month in the U.S. caused by pedal application errors. Females were the drivers in nearly two-thirds of the pedal misapplication crashes identified in crash databases and in a media scan used in the study."
Re:No one hurt . (Score:5, Informative)
This isn't something I can imagine doing anywhere near as badly in a manual. You panic, you stomp brake and clutch. Miss the brake and go for the accelerator, and you rev like crap but don't accelerate. You miss the clutch, you stall it. Seems like quite a challenge to miss the clutch and hit the foot rest, whilst simultaneously missing the brake and hitting the accelerator.
http://www.nhtsa.gov/staticfil... [nhtsa.gov]
Researchers reviewed each crash narrative to determine whether the crash actually resulted
from a pedal application error. Of the 2,930 crashes, 2,411 were caused by a driver applying the
accelerator when he or she intended to apply the brake. Fifty-eight were the result of the driver’s
foot slipping from the brake and pressing the accelerator, 47 were the result of the driver pressing
the wrong pedal in a vehicle with manual transmission (either clutch or accelerator rather than the
brake, or the brake rather than the clutch). Reviewers determined the remaining 414 crashes not to
11 be the resultt of a pedal misapplication; these 519 incidents were therefore excluded from the present
analyses.
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See previous sentences "In a shift car,
Re:No one hurt . (Score:4, Insightful)
For various reasons, my next car is likely to be a plug-in hybrid or pure electric. I'm going to miss that capability.
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Re:Heals (Score:4, Funny)
You can't wear heals; they can only be cast by a cleric.
Re:Heals (Score:4, Funny)
Technically it's classist.
Re: Heals (Score:5, Insightful)
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I don't drive in my five inch heels. Even though they're boots and a pain to remove, I take them off and drive in bare feet.
It'd be pretty fucking foolish not to.
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I can't move my seat far enough back that using my toes becomes an option.
Re: Somebody's getting a beating tonight (Score:4, Insightful)
If it's like my Honda Civic, "drive by wire," then there is a simple sealed variable resistor installed at the pedal lever. If one wire fails, the encoding ADC will either swing to the top or the bottom of the range. There really isn't a "throttle body" in an electric car.
So it is still possible that the throttle encoding circuit/wires failed and the computer logged a "full press" even though it wasn't pressed at all.
If it actually logged 512 or whatever the max is, I wonder if a normal press of the pedal could have achieved full scale? Maybe.
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In most if not all cars there are redundant sensors for the throttle position and the ECU is designed to detect a failure.
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By default they're attached to flowers.
Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
Not being funny...
but if the logs show 100% acceleration, that just reflects the sensor value. Not that the user - or indeed anything else like a dropped handbag - actually pressed the pedal that far.
Although I'm always the one to shout "user error" first, and that's quite likely in this case, the logs alone are not sufficient to prove fault. Only to act like a flight recorder and say what the sensors recorded and what the machine did in response to that input.
How the sensor got that reading could still be manufacturing fault, cable fatigue, or a million and one other things not the fault of the driver.
Re:Really? (Score:5, Funny)
How the sensor got that reading could still be manufacturing fault, cable fatigue, or a million and one other things not the fault of the driver.
Your argument is valid but "his 45 year old wife behind the wheel" gets priority .
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If a dropped hangbag pressed the pedal, it would've had to be filled with a few very heavy objects - like bricks - to make it move enough to register 100% throttle.
Pretty much every pedal I've had my foot upon needs several pounds of pressure to get it to maximum depression.
Re:Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the bigger point is that the car wasn't in autopilot mode at the time. I don't think the drivers are realizing that they can check and call them on their bullshit.
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Indeed. To me this has all the hallmarks of insurance fraud and/or an attempt to get off negligent driving charges.
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It might not have been in whatever they officially call autopilot, but modern cars suddenly accelerating due to control system failure is, unfortunately, not unheard of.
Of course, neither is someone confusing the accelerator and brake pedals while in a panic that the car is suddenly speeding up. We don't know enough to say what really happened here from what I've seen so far.
Re:Really? (Score:4, Insightful)
Rapid acceleration due to controller failure AND the lack record for brakes being applied at the same time? That sounds unlikely. Possible, but unlikely.
Re:Really? (Score:5, Interesting)
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I think the bigger point is that the car wasn't in autopilot mode at the time. I don't think the drivers are realizing that they can check and call them on their bullshit.
Generalizing a question, does a certain 'mode' have to be activated for a bug in software/firmware to cause a problem with a device that might currently be in another mode?
I would say no.
To give a legacy car analogy, cruise control can be disabled and the gas pedal could still get stuck at full acceleration.
http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/... [go.com]
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It's likely she just assumed or said it was autopilot when the car accelerated without her commanding it to. Maybe she had the mat laying over the accelerator, maybe she pushed the wrong pedal, maybe the sensor failed.
This is the nature of bug reports from users, vague and sometimes misleading but not always just user error.
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suddenly and unexpectedly accelerated at high speed on its own
I don't see any mention of autopilot in TFA. Maybe he claimed it was on autopilot somewhere else, but not here.
That said, everything about this indicates she stepped on the accelerator instead of the brakes.
Re:Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
There's nothing preventing "45 year old wives" from knowing something about the machines they operate. Actually, I do expect people operating machinery that can lead to accidents that endanger the lives of others to know enough about them to operate them safely. Independent of gender, race, age... you get the idea.
Re:Really? (Score:4, Informative)
At the very least I expect someone to be able to operate a machine so that it is of no harm to me. If the person is unwilling or unable to learn enough about the machine to not be a threat to others, the person has no right to operate the machine.
Re:Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
Technology is about to be mandated that will stop incidents like this; mandatory Automated Emergency Braking is coming in what, 2020? 2025? Real soon now, since all the major manufacturers and suppliers have an AEB solution available. And then "wrong pedal" collisions will be a thing of the past. The car simply won't let you do that.
It's too bad enough of us couldn't be responsible for humans to be able to keep the responsibility of driving, but more and more of it is being taken away.
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" I don't see any *good* reason a car should allow a driver to hit another object."
Then you've probably never been shot at while driving your vehicle. Try living in Memphis, some time.
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Your expectation does not match the legal requirements in the U.S. While desirable, too many people just don't give a damn. We should have fixed this situation long ago, but fortunately, we'll be saved in the not too distant future by self driving vehicles.
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Most of all I don't use more words than absolutely, positively and ultimately required to express the message that I wish to convey.
So you are right. The word I should have used is "demand".
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I only know three or four women 45+ years old that can do any real mechanical work.
That changes when you get into the 70+ year old range - they're a bit better because they came from a generation where you fixed things and did things yourself.
I know maybe two younger girls (21+) that work on cars - HOWEVER they're only into the mechanical stuff, nothing electrical excepting the alternator and wiring harness interests them in that regard.
And I know WAY more girls than I do guys - the eternal gay curse.
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If my car suddenly accelerated, I would call that "on autopilot" in a car that has an autopilot.
And if your car didn't have it, you'd have to find a different excuse.
Re:Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
Users are also capable of not telling the truth. The logs are almost certainly accurate.
That doesn't entirely rule out a fault - if the system erroneously reads a 100% accelerator pedal depression, then it will record that and act on it; the error then being in the sensor, not the logging or action taken by the car.
But when somebody is parking, they are going to press the brake to stop - and if they find they are not stopping, or accelerating, they'll press it harder. So a 100% depression is also consistent with someone mistakenly pressing the accelerator instead of the brake.
When you make it possible to the blame the car, some people are going to do so instead of taking responsibility. On balance, I'm inclined to believe this was user error.
Re:Really? (Score:4, Insightful)
In the case of Toyota while many cases could probably be attributed to a problem between the steering wheel and the seat, it was also found that the ECM code was horribly written spaghetti code that had numerous flaws in it that didn't follow most of the guidelines for automotive design.
In this case since they had only had the car for 5 days I say it was a problem between the steering wheel and seat.
Re:Really? (Score:5, Funny)
"...evaporate on their 44th birthday because God abhors an old, married, female engineer."
Actually, management requires that all engineers evaporate on this date.
With Experience of Similar Incidents... (Score:5, Informative)
If Tesla are saying that the telemetry from the black box shows 100% throttle, then at this juncture, I'd be inclined to believe them.
Years ago I spent my spare time helping a friend run his garage business, which included running a contract with a local Police force to recover accident-damaged vehicles. I saw numerous examples of situations in which drivers of automatic cars [and all Teslas are automatic by default] encountered something unexpected on the road. Their first instinct was to slam down on the brake pedal, but you would be amazed at how many managed to hit the throttle by mistake. In the panic and shock of an event, the body can lock up involuntarily, especially, if you think about it, if your car suddenly shot forward under the full acceleration that a Tesla is capable of...
It's way too early to say without more concrete data, but based on the above two points [knowledge of Tesla's extensive telemetry and personal experience of real-world examples like this] my "Occam's Razor" punt would suggest that something happened, the driver panicked, hit the wrong pedal, and the rest is history...
Re:With Experience of Similar Incidents... (Score:5, Insightful)
I did this a few weeks ago.... I was driving along a fairly empty road and had to go past a parked vehicle, so I tapped the brake and to my horror the car went faster! I realised afterwards that I'd been driving for a while and I wasn't sitting completely straight to the wheel, so my feet weren't aligned with the pedals. Then I moved my foot across, too far, and now I was punching between the clutch and the brake (pressing both pedals, but weirdly because they have different pressures) - nothing was working, total madness! It was dark and i couldn't see my feet, and I sailed past the parked car at speed before I finally realigned and got back in control.
Whereupon I straightened myself up, slowed down, and spent the rest of the journey muttering shit...shit...! It'd never happened before, I didn't even consider it a risk. Scary.
Re:With Experience of Similar Incidents... (Score:5, Interesting)
Good of you to admit it.
I did it once on a rental car after driving for 12 hours... We were on loose gravel and only created a shower of dust. I caught the mistake instantly, but it was enough for my passenger to take over driving. If it were clean asphalt and I were in a sportscar, it would have been a wreck.
FTA: "She knows the difference between brake and accelerator pedal. " - it's amazing how people attribute it to knowledge and discredit "not knowing" as a question of intelligence. The car was 5 days old, it takes more time than that to become intimately familiar with the car.
The reflex reaction to the car lurching forward when you hit the brake is.... hit the brake harder...
And it's ridiculous that the article is interviewing her husband.
Re:With Experience of Similar Incidents... (Score:4, Interesting)
There was a study recently about going on "autopilot" while walking or driving (https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/mental-mishaps/201404/the-dangers-going-autopilot [psychologytoday.com]) and how people avoided obstacles, but didn't truly notice them. Part of the experiment was to bend a branch to head height and then place dollar bills on it. People avoided the branch, but didn't notice the money even when it was waving right in front of them. They even a large sign announcing that a psychological experiment that explained what was going on place in the middle of a path. When asked shortly afterwards about the obstacles, people didn't remember them. They just avoided them.
People get into a car and automatically behave as if they've been driving that car or road regularly, even a new one. They zone out, react to a normal occurrence and because of their unfamiliarity with the vehicle/road do the wrong thing.
Re:With Experience of Similar Incidents... (Score:5, Insightful)
> The car was 5 days old, it takes more time than that to become intimately familiar with the car.
This is a key piece. I was astonished when I bought a new car how different everything felt for a few weeks. I'd had the old car for 12 years and everything was second nature in it but it takes a while to get used to a new vehicle's layout and handling.
Re:With Experience of Similar Incidents... (Score:4, Funny)
That all depends on the size of your feet. Plenty of people especially women with small and narrow feet can get their foot between the peddles with ease on lots of models. Just because you have feet the size of Micheal Phelps don't assume everyone else does too.
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I'm a little suspicious of it being exactly 100% max throttle. If it's an analog A/D you'd think it would be like 100.01% or 99.95% or some in-exact value. It would also be essential to record the intermediate values from 0% to 100%. A jump from 0% immediately to exactly 100% seems a little suspicious to me. Or it could just be the software discretizing the analog data from the pedal at a low sample rate. We don't have the source code to really know.
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I don't know about Tesla's design, but drive-by-wire cars often have, in addition to one or more throttle position sensors, a "closed throttle position sensor" and a "wide open throttle" sensor, each corresponding to precisely 0% and 100% respectively.
Even if Tesla didn't use these, one would expect that the DSP driving the throttle sensor(s) would be calibrated to run from 0 to 100% and truncate any values over that, rather than feeding out-of-spec data onwards into the system.
Furthermore, there is nothing
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It's also exactly the word one would use for a person slamming on the accelerator with their foot.
Nobody says anything about any sort of unnatural transition between non-depressed and fully depressed pedal states; you're writing that into their statements.
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Come on, do you really think their own actual technical logs showed exactly 100%? They saw some value which may or may not be anywhere near "100" and translated it to a human-understandable "100% throttle" meaning "the pedal was pushed all the way down".
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This is a car, not a computer. There are dozens of separate processing units in a modern car. They're not all built into the system that does the logging, as if it could grab whatever data it wants from any of them. Each processing unit is compartmentalized to a specific task. And Tesla, like any other manufacture, does not design all of them.
It's actually rather inefficient from a systems approach, but it's the way things are done in the auto industr
Re:With Experience of Similar Incidents... (Score:5, Interesting)
This is a car, not a computer. There are dozens of separate processing units in a modern car. They're not all built into the system that does the logging, as if it could grab whatever data it wants from any of them. Each processing unit is compartmentalized to a specific task. And Tesla, like any other manufacture, does not design all of them.
It's actually rather inefficient from a systems approach, but it's the way things are done in the auto industry, and it's not going to be easy to change that.
Too bad you don't know how cars work. Each module does its own logging, and the accelerator pedal sensor is connected directly to the PCM. They're not all built into the system that does the logging, the logging is built into all of them. When you want powertrain codes, you have to scan both the PCM and TCM in a typical vehicle, and that's not even counting the ABS which also interacts with the traction control.
Re:With Experience of Similar Incidents... (Score:5, Informative)
Not sure what happeend to my response, as I already replied to this :P
No, too bad you don't know how Teslas work. Teslas actually contain a homebrew Linux box specifically for logging and systems management. When people speak of "the logs" in a Tesla, that is what they're referring to. You download them by plugging in a USB stick. Accelerator stats are are in field 10 (DR1S), offset 12. Value 0 is 0% throttle, value 255 is 100% throttle. It's logged once per second.
I seriously doubt the accelerator itself actually records a constant, internal high-resolution reading of the outputs of each of its sensors. When Tesla wants to investigate a problem, they pull The Logs(TM) as described above. And that's clearly what they did here.
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In "The book of the Ford", a "missing manual" type book for the Model T Ford written some time around 1920, it mentions that the Model T Ford was designed to stop when both pedals were pressed down at once due to this instinct.
I say both pedals since there was no clutch pedal. It used brakebands instead of a clutch and all gear changing was handled by hand instead of hand and
Re:With Experience of Similar Incidents... (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd be inclined to agree with you but for one thing... A few years ago Tesla let BBC Top Gear test a Roadster, and Jeremy Clarkson lampooned the vehicle in a way that annoyed Elon Musk. Ever since then Tesla have put a *lot* of data capture capability and performance monitoring into all of their vehicles, specifically to stop these sorts of claims.
The problem is that the sensors are recording what happens but not why it happens. The sensor can say that the throttle was 100% but it doesn't actually record the movement of a biological leg and foot - it assumes it.
Toyota has recalled cars because of the gas pedal sticking. If that were to happen in a tesla, the sensors would show the throttle going to 100% and would blame the driver when in fact the car was at fault.
http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/... [go.com]
Re: Jeremy Clarkson lampooned the vehicle (Score:5, Interesting)
Tesla lost because the judge determined the show was entertainment and not a documentary or news program and had no requirement to be factual.
They lied and faked almost the entire thing.
Re: Jeremy Clarkson lampooned the vehicle (Score:5, Informative)
No, they didn't lie or fake anything. If you go back and read the judgment you see that Top Gear was honest.
They pushed a car claiming it had run out of power into the garage when it still had considerable charge left. They admitted this in court as showing an example of "what could happen" but omitting this on the show.
If you don't consider that lying or faking that says a lot about you as a person.
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No, a single sensor wouldn't meet the reqs [ecfr.gov]:
So I'll substitute that in the following text.
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How the sensor got that reading could still be manufacturing fault, cable fatigue, or a million and one other things not the fault of the driver.
Designing a pedal sensor that errors to 0% is expected. So when one of those million things goes wrong you do not get the 100% acceleration experienced in this situation. A far more likely scenario is that something dropped onto the acceleration petal. Alternatively, when in a state of shock, the driver mistook the acceleration petal for the brake.
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In the spirit of advocacy for the Devil, one of the issues that I had with my 1985 Ford Escort was the throttle position sensor. Luckily applying 100% torque to a 1.6L, 70 HP engine only produces 119 Nm of torque (vs. over 900 Nm for the Tesla). Hmmm... weight, about 1000 kg vs about 2200 kg, still a pretty big difference. I'd rather have the bad TPS in a 1985 Escort than at 2016 Model S.
Certainly in 1985 the TPS position probably wasn't logged. Mass market fuel injection for cheap cars was still in its inf
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A lot of cars still don't log values at the TPS, it'll report with a tool connected but that's it. A buddy of mine owns a garage and recently had a car(2013 enjoying those 3 year warranties up here in Canada yet?) in and he couldn't figure out what the problem was, at times the car would stall at others it would would run at the maximum RPM under no motion(around 4200RPM) according to the vehicle speed sensor and sometimes it would be just fine for days on end. TPS sensor showed no errors to the ECM eithe
Re: Really? (Score:4, Insightful)
She claimed it was in autopilot.. It appears it was not. How does a sensor reading explain that?
It's called arse covering and blame shifting.. People do it all the time.
If she had described an unexpected acceleration while manually driving then the story may wash..
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She claimed it was in autopilot.. It appears it was not..
She claimed, Tesla claimed otherwise. Actually I would expect that in case of some strange error, the autopilot disengages immediately so Tesla can truthfully says it was not on during time of accident.
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Re: Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
If you're building a safety critical system, having two sensors won't do you much good. Even if they disagree, you have no way to know which is wrong, only that some fault exists. The best you can do in that situation is try to fail to safe, but in a vehicle where stopping suddenly at the wrong time or in the wrong place could be more dangerous than carrying on until it's safer, there is no perfect failsafe mode.
Having three parallel systems, ideally made with different types components to guard against design defects, gets you something more useful, since you can at least take a majority vote if one of the sensors is out of sync with the other two. Obviously this is also more expensive to implement, though.
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That's exactly the problem. What you suggest is very ok for a person-graded orbital system or maybe a passenger plane, but who's going to pay for it in a consumer car?
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But capitalists are cheaper. Look into the process of designing a modern car...
Re: Really? (Score:4, Informative)
Almost all gas pedals in cars are implemented as potentiometers. (Not only Tesla. This is being done for years now.)
A pot-meter has 3 legs and both resistor values are measured.
If the measurements don't agree, an error is logged in hte on-board computer (and warning is generated) and the safest value is assumed.
So in case of a 100% acceleration one measurement would be "low" and the other "high", the exact oposite of not touching the gas pedal.
If you are wondering: The AD convertors are also separated in hardware.
In other news: In electronically controlled cars, applying the gas pedal and the breaks at the same time, get you an error and only breaks...
Re: Really? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: Really? (Score:5, Funny)
The Raman's always did things in threes
That's really using your noodle.
Re: Really? (Score:5, Interesting)
Majority voting with three systems has turned out to be dangerous on quite a few occasions. At least with two systems disagreeing, you can decide "I don't know which one is right, so I'll do the safe thing". With two out of three giving an incorrect value, it leads to misplaced confidence in this wrong value.
Examples:
- (human): Primary altimeters different between captain and F/O, standby altimeter agrees with captain, but F/O altimeter was correct. Don't remember the flight number or even the company, but they crashed into a mountain. If they hadn't had the standby altimeter, they would have gone with the lowest of the two indications until they could intercept a glide slope somewhere.
- (automatic): The A320 has independent Angle Of Attack probes, but if you climb through heavy icing, it turns out two can freeze up at the same time. The system sees a confirmed stall (even though it should be impossible given the current speed, attitude and inertial measurements) because two systems agreeing can't ever be wrong, and it pushes the nose down. Even if both pilots pull back on the stick, the nose continues to drop. We now have an official procedure to shut off two of the Air Data Reference units, leaving only one remaining. That's the only way of shaking the absolute confidence of the system in two identical but false signals.
Re: Really? (Score:4)
Three sensors is not necessary; two (plus fault logging) is fine.
Accelerator: chose the lower value of the two, log an error if they differ by more than a given margin.
Braking: chose the higher value of the two, log an error if they differ by more than a given margin.
The worst case for the former is that your car doesn't accelerate. The worst case for the latter is that your car slams on the brakes. In neither case would you be at fault in an accident even if there wasn't a hardware error, as the person behind you is always supposed to maintain sufficient distance to avoid an accident regardless of what the person in front of them does.
Also, I find it kind of strange how people treat drive-by-wire as if it's some inherently erroneous system, yet think driving by mechanical linkages is somehow foolproof.
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Mechanical linkages can be grabbed and wiggled to be evaluated. Nothing will tell you if an electrical component is about to fail.
You got that backwards. Mechanical linkages can not be monitored online and only checked in specific maintenance periods. Electronic components can monitored and diagnosed online line, compared with in logic, and be error corrected in ways that during component failure the worst the user experiences is a little alert that their car needs to be looked at.
It's all about the design you apply.
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How often does the average person "grab and wiggle" the mechanical linkages on their accelerator and brakes and evaluate whether they're likely to fail soon? A drive-by-wire system going into failsafe will let you know and will, as the name says, "fail safe" (the lower of two acceleration values or the higher of two braking values). A broken or stuck mechanical linkage will just suddenly and instantaneously be broken or stuck, and not inherently in a failsafe position. Stuck accelerators are a real and t
Re: Really? (Score:5, Funny)
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Is it because they are women or because women's fashion increases the chance of unsuitable footwear? Let's not jump to some half-baked conclusions...
Kind of risky (Score:2)
I am sure that on the surface it seemed like a good idea to try and blame the car for the couple.
No doubt they wanted to avoid the major increase in insurance premiums and the long wait time for a replacement car.
Nowadays though, with all the tech in cars, it is much easier to check what happened.
Technically, they could now be on the hook for filing a false police report and insurance fraud.
On the other hand, it is possible that it was an honest mistake. It happens regularly that someone "thinks" they have
Are the logs readable by anyone but Tesla? (Score:5, Insightful)
Serious question... is this open information that the driver or owner of the car can read, or is this super secret encoded info that only Tesla has access to?
Do we simply take their word for what the logs say? Is there any way to check via 3rd party that this is in fact what happened and there is a secure means of ensuring the data isn't changed?
This is important, sooner or later it'll end up in court and this will come up. "Trust us" is not an answer.
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I would guess they don't want people tampering with the black box logs. Although, they could prevent that by just signing the logs from an embedded key as they get written.
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Sure, but I said "readable", not writable :)
All I'm saying is that everyone seems to be given Tesla a level of trust that they would never give Ford or GM.
Re:Are the logs readable by anyone but Tesla? (Score:4, Funny)
Well, in all fairness, Tesla never cheated with exhaust parameters...
And they're pretty credible in that area.
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Subpoena?
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Subpoena?
Fair enough, but can you trust that what they hand you is what they really are?
And since you own the car, shouldn't you be able to read your own logs?
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Open Source... followed by the ability to compile it yourself and compare them...
So Tesla tracks everything to do with your car... (Score:4, Interesting)
So Tesla tracks everything to do with your car, people here seem to love them...
Yet bring up Microsoft and Windows 10 and all that tracking and everyone goes all crazy and how "evilz" MS is...
What's up with that?
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Intent counts for a lot.
History has shown us that Microsoft will do everything they can to screw with their customers in any way possibly.
So far, Tesla has been incredibly customer friendly. Until that changes, the data they collect serves to make their products better.
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So far, Tesla has been incredibly customer friendly. Until that changes, the data they collect serves to make their products better.
When that changes...
Tesla is a public company... Google made the "don't be evil" promise once as well, it'll never last...
Re:So Tesla tracks everything to do with your car. (Score:5, Insightful)
That was my question exactly.
Why does no one object when I place a camera on the floor of a factory for safety reasons?
But everybody gets hysterical when I place that same camera in the employee toilet looking directly at the employees taking a dump?
What's up with that?
Re:So Tesla tracks everything to do with your car. (Score:5, Funny)
I know, right? It's like when Miley Cyrus gets naked and licks a sledgehammer they call it "art" and she's an "artist", but when I do it, they're all like "We're going to have to ask you to leave the hardware store" and stuff. I just don't get some people.
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Am I entrusting my life to my PC? Mostly not. A car can kill me almost instantly.
Re: (Score:3)
I wouldn't be so sure...
https://www.teslamotors.com/ab... [teslamotors.com]
Telematics Log Data: To improve our vehicles and services for you, we collect certain telematics data regarding the performance, usage, operation, and condition of your Tesla vehicle, including the following: vehicle identification number, speed information, odometer readings, battery use management information, battery charging history, electrical system functions, software version information, infotainment system data, safetyârelated data (including information regarding the vehicleâ(TM)s SRS systems, brakes, security, eâbrake), and other data to assist in identifying and analyzing the performance of the vehicle. We may collect such information either in person (e.g., during a service appointment) or via remote access.
Remote vehicle analysis: We may be able to dynamically connect to your Tesla vehicle to diagnose and resolve issues with it, and this process may result in access to personal settings in the vehicle (such as contacts, browsing history, navigation history, and radio listening history). This dynamic connection also enables us to view the current location of your vehicle, but such access is restricted to a limited number of personnel within Tesla.
Solution? (Score:2)
Re: Solution? (Score:2)
Log transcript (Score:2)
Driver: "Autopilot, I need you to stop until the high speed cross traffic has cleared."
Autopilot: "I'm afraid I can't do that, Dave."
Audi 5000 (Score:4, Insightful)
Reminds me of unintended acceleration in Audi 5000s: drivers swore that the vehicle accelerated at full power while they had their foot hard on the brake. Of course, their foot was in fact on the accelerator.
Sudden unintended acceleration#Audi_5000 [wikipedia.org].
Eventually a motoring journalist did the obvious experiment: what happens when you press both pedals at once? At speed or at rest, the brakes won.
Design was a factor: the brake and accelerator were sized and positioned so as to make this mistake easier to make in the Audi 5000 compared to many other cars.
Its actually pretty easy to determine a fault (Score:5, Informative)
Simply sampling the pedal 10k times a second is another way. A pedal is a physical device and as such probably cannot be moved through its travel much faster than in 0.1 seconds. You should have one thousand readings showing a smooth transition from unpressed to fully pressed. That is a world of difference from going from unpressed to pressed in 0.0001 seconds - a single sensor reading time sample
Another common sensor fault is getting lots of jitter. Again you can see that the sensor can't be functioning realistically because real pedals cannot move that fast.
Add in a bunch of very simple algorithms and it's pretty easy to approach 100% accuracy in determining if a sensor is feeding correct data or not. It's so trivial and sensor design 101 that I can't imagine all three of these are not already in the tesla.
Accelerator failsafe? (Score:4, Interesting)
Probably won't get noticed 150+ comments deep, but...
Perhaps the default configuration for the pedals should be a failsafe mode where the car is always "under control". When you slam the brake, you trend toward 0 MPH. If you slam on the gas, maybe the pedal interprets 100% as 0%, and applies no throttle. If you're accelerating, you should always have control of the accelerator. Flooring it isn't going to give you much more than 95% throttle would, and you could have a tactile bump at the end of the accelerator play that is easy sensed when you feather your foot, but also easily bypassed if you slam the pedal.
Basically, allow people to still gun it, just not outright "drag racing", and prevent unintended acceleration.
Re: (Score:2)
No...
This proves her story is wrong. It does not prove Tesla innocent. There are other scenarios which would have lead to this sensor readout and put Tesla at fault such as a faulty sensor or something jamming the accelerator down.
However we now have on once side someone that is known to lie and on the other side we have Tesla which does not have a past history of lying. So without any further information I'm be inclined to believe the 'meatsack' is at fault.
Re: (Score:2)
"Not even remotely possible say the pot on the accelerator went bad contact, demanded max throttle and that left the audit trail in the logs?"
But why would it demand max throttle? we're pretty good at error detection in electronics nowadays, we've been doing it for a long time now. If something is wrong the default will be zero acceleration not maximum acceleration.
Effectively then the only input that can trigger maximum acceleration is depression of the pedal.
This doesn't mean that something couldn't be dr
Re: (Score:2)
That's what airlines have been saying for decades and now similar technology is in cars.
Re: (Score:2)
Because if its in the data logs thats cast iron it was the meatsack's fault right?
Not even remotely possible say the pot on the accelerator went bad contact, demanded max throttle and that left the audit trail in the logs?
I know that every single one who claims to know what happened or did not happen is talking a huge pile of BS.
Ruling out a sensor malfunction is BS, too, but so is ignoring that human error is more likely than a sensor that should be designed to fail safely gets stuck at 100%