There’s no sudden acceleration problem with Tesla, feds say

The latest petition about Teslas and sudden, unintentional acceleration involved claims about a voltage spike in the car inverter. Not so in this case: Costas Lakafossis presented NHTSA with an extensive technical paper that attempts to demonstrate that human error is not the problem, but rather that there are “very specific patterns repeating themselves in almost all of these SUA accidents, all pointing to the same cause of potential confusion and the same lack of appropriate preventive measures in the programming of the human-system interface of modern self-driving cars.”

Essentially, because a driver does not need to hold down the brake pedal when starting a Tesla, its driver could hit the accelerator by mistake, Lakafossis claimed, thus explaining around 200 incidents in which Teslas crashed into garage walls or other parked cars. But as Lakfaossis noted in his petition, NHTSA has already determined that all of those accidents were driver error, and that’s the case today as well. One-pedal driving is common across the industry, NHTSA said, and it won’t be possible to add the equivalent of a brake transmission lock to 2.3 million Teslas.

FSD investigation deepens

Humans cannot see in this glare, nor can camera-based vision systems.

Credit: Getty Images

Thursday was a less good day for Tesla’s relationship with NHTSA. Yesterday, NHTSA expanded a “preliminary analysis” to a “engineering analysis“—that is, a more thorough investigation—into Tesla’s vision-only “FSD” system. Without a second sensor modality to rely on (virtually every other automaker uses radar and sometimes lidar as well), Tesla wrote software to detect if the camera feeds were too degraded to rely on. If this were the case, the driver would be notified to take control. That’s the idea, at least.

NHTSA said it is concerned that the system “may not adequately detect and/or warn the driver under degraded visibility conditions, such as glare and mid-air obscurations.” After reviewing nine crashes, the agency said “the system did not detect common road conditions that impaired camera visibility and/or provide alerts when camera performance had deteriorated until immediately before the crash occurred.” NHTSA also said the number of linked crashes may be underreported and is adding six more incidents to the analysis.

If NHTSA finds an engineering defect, Tesla could be forced to recall more than 3.2 million vehicles.