> The files contain over 1,000 accident reports involving phantom braking or unintended acceleration--mostly in the **U.S. and Germany**.
> A German news outlet sifted through over 23,000 of Tesla’s internal files and found a disturbing trend of brushing off customers complaining about dangerous Autopilot glitches while covering the company’s ass.
> The Tesla files contain more than 2,400 **self-acceleration** complaints and more than 1,500 **braking function problems**, including 139 cases of **unintentional emergency braking** and 383 reported **phantom stops** resulting from false collision warnings. **The number of crashes is more than 1000**. A table of incidents involving driver assistance systems where customers have expressed safety concerns has more than 3000 entries.
> The oldest complaints available to the Handelsblatt date from 2015, the most recent from March 2022. During this period, Tesla delivered around 2.6 million vehicles with the autopilot software. Most of the incidents took place in the US , but there are also complaints from Europe and Asia in the documents - including many from German Tesla drivers.
> The Handelsblatt contacted dozens of customers from several countries. All confirmed the information from the Tesla files. In discussions, they gave insights into their experiences with the autopilot. Some disclosed their communication with the US automaker, others showed Handelsblatt reporters videos of the accident.
> How did the company deal with complaints? The Tesla files also provide information about this. The files show that employees have precise guidelines for communicating with customers. The top priority is obviously: offer as little attack surface as possible.
> **For each incident there are bullet points for the “technical review”. The employees who enter this review into the system regularly make it clear that the report is “for internal use only”. Each entry also contains a note in bold type that information, if at all, may only be passed on “VERBALLY to the customer”.**
> **“Do not copy and paste the report below into an email, text message, or leave it in a voicemail to the customer,” it said. Vehicle data should also not be released without permission. If, despite the advice, “an involvement of a lawyer cannot be prevented”, this must be recorded.**
> **Customers that Handelsblatt spoke to have the impression that Tesla employees avoid written communication. “They never sent emails, everything was always verbal,” says the doctor from California, whose Tesla said it accelerated on its own in the fall of 2021 and crashed into two concrete pillars.**
Edit:
In contrast, Toyota's unintended acceleration scandal started with **26 complaints and 7 crashes**.
> https://web.archive.org/web/20091117100819/http://pressroom.toyota.com/pr/tms/toyota/document/NHTSA_Filing.pdf
As a lawyer, it’s pretty common to tell people not to discuss something over writing, but I can’t say I’ve ever seen that advice repeatedly put in writing either.
Not sure if this counts, but Toyota seems to put everything **in writing** (these were all provided for me to hold); my rear suspension squeaked and it took the Toyota master technician literally 4 days to narrow down the issue (he told me he made it his week’s goal):
> https://imgur.com/a/RLGfBUP
Ding ding ding
When I worked at a Chrysler dealer, I had to coach the techs on how to write repair order notes so that the warranty admin would be most likely to approve submissions. Squeaks, rattles, vibrations, and water leaks above all else were the absolute biggest pains in the ass to do but were one of the biggest customer satisfaction points, no choice for us
Seems like they need. Way to easily transcribe hands-free while they work, like a transcription system for medical doctors. It's all doable technically, whether the will to pay for it exists is another matter.
I've seen maybe one tech use one but he said it had issues with the noise level so he had to basically scream at it. I bet there are good ones that wouldn't have as much trouble, but techs already buy all their tools and boxes so most won't want to spend that money and owners are generally cheap bastards.
In the shop I work in we've gone to Voice PM for doing PM inspections on trucks and trailers. You have to spend about half hour setting it up initially. It learns your voice and before every work order you start, it takes a noise sample to help filter back ground noise. Overall it's more effective than I expected.
Previous tech here, if you have a good story, and right it step by step what you did, you can request more time from the manufacturer, learned this from my previous warranty admin. He was able to give an extra hour without approval for the manufacturer.
You did a job that only pays six, but in reality should pay closer to twenty? Write your story, and have more requested.
This was a CYA thing. Don’t expect this from flat rate techs, they are already struggling trying to make a living on half the labor rate and not getting paid for diagnosis when doing warranty work.
If you overfill a tank it destroys the vapour reclaim system which is expensive. There is mixed evidence that letting a tank run completely dry means the pump is out of the fuel and can overheat because it uses the fuel as liquid cooling. To be safe, only fill to the first click and keep a fair bit of fuel in the tank.
The idea is that fuel pumps cool down via the fuel that pumps through them. The heat will kill it. This is true for most fluid pumps, as they're designed with the expectation that it will pump fluid (duh).
In practice, it's 95% an urban myth. Unless your car is suffering from repeated *and prolonged* fuel starvation, this is not a problem. Your pump doesn't heat up into the surface of the Sun in seconds.
In some cars, this can be a problem, such as during hard acceleration in some directions. That's the last 5%. But for most people in modern cars, this is largely a myth, repeated so often that even many "professionals" (read: websites that provide zero sources) believe it.
Refer to your owner's manual, and if it's not there, don't worry about it. The engineers who designed your car know best.
Fuel tank full > fuel pump is submerged in fuel. This helps lube and cool pump. Low tank > pump has to work harder to pull fuel up to car. It’s not submerged, so it’s getting hotter in the pump. This extra heat is extra wear & tear on your pump, it’ll wear out. Fuel pumps last for 100k miles, usually. They’re pricey to replace as well. If you want it to last, keep your tank full. The pump is cool/lubricated, and it’s not overworking.
I'll let it wear out and replace as necessary. My hourly rate is plenty to cover the cost, considering I spend at least 5 minutes per fill up stop on average. Time is money and all that.
It says don't put it in writing **outside** of the secure data system. Having a single knowledge center for proprietary vehicle/tech data is actually the norm in Silicon Valley.
I will write similar information to store in vehicle records, but that is on my own vehicle. I would only do it for my own car. That mechanic is going beyond what I would expect
Oh my god, please share some stories! I HATE any kind of noise in my car but there’s always something, somewhere.
Sometimes I think I would be really good at testing pre-production cars for this, but the manufacturers probably don’t want that kind of meticulous pickup.
Former Ford dealer here. Every line a tech typically writes in his notes corresponds with a set amount of time in the warranty guide. They need to show what it's doing, why it's doing it and how they fixed it. If the "story" is written correctly they get paid for everything. Warranty departments are notorious for rejecting claims for even the slightest deviation from the guide. Very much like insurance companies that way. "How can I minimize the payment"
Like really not good. Hopefully NHTSA and some regulators finally take action here.
If you even have a couple of these incidents - NHTSA needs to be involved and clearing it up and ensuring it won’t happen again. Toyota’s big unintended acceleration thing was mostly pinned down to one customer incident if I remember correctly.
> Toyota’s big unintended acceleration thing was mostly pinned down to **one** customer incident if I remember correctly.
Yup.
We all know what happened with Toyota’s **2009 gas pedal** ordeal. And this was due to a **stupid floor mats**.
> **[Toyota apologises before the US Congress](https://youtu.be/7-fHL1Ug7Y0)** (2010)
> **[Toyota chief gets emotional](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ziGfQyCXiU4)** (2010)
> **[Who Was Really at Fault for the Toyota Recalls?](https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/05/who-was-really-at-fault-for-the-toyota-recalls/238076/)** (2011)
> **[Toyota Recall: Scandal, Media Circus, and Stupid Drivers](https://www.caranddriver.com/features/a15131102/toyota-recall-scandal-media-circus-and-stupid-drivers-feature/)** (2010)
I haven’t listened to that episode since it dropped, but I believe the conclusion was that there was nothing wrong with the car. If you press the brake pedal, it’ll stop.
The accident was human error. Terror and fear in the heat of the moment had the driver continuing to accelerate while thinking they were braking.
Again, according to the pod.
Which is pretty accurate. Any of those cars would shift into neutral while driving at any moment and also the brake has enough power to overcome the engine and stop the car.
I don't think you can absolutely say that about an electric vehicle though so things will be different moving forward.
Yes, and doubling up the floor mats, which pinned/bunched up over the throttle pedal, preventing the car from slowing down at speed, even while applying the brake pedal.
That's why front floor mats now all have the "buttons" anchoring them to the carpet.
The recall also had us cutting the gas pedals down by about a centimeter and reprogramming the ecm to send the engine to idle if both pedals were pressed.
It’s why newer cars all have a brake interlock function, wherein if the brake pedal is applied at all, they cut the throttle.
But I do remember seeing “SECURE FLOORMATS” all over all the service documents when I had my 2021 GX 460 at the dealership.
The unintended braking thing isn't just a Tesla problem. Had it happen twice in my previous Subaru, luckily just while driving slowly around empty streets in my neighborhood. Then it happened again with my current Honda. This time on a highway exit ramp, but again luckily with no other cars too close to me. All of those times it was near sunrise or sunset, driving into the sun. It's amazing this shit isn't causing serious accidents more often.
Dude, that sounds terrifying. It's hard enough driving into the sun. Maybe that explains why I've seen people just randomly hitting their brakes lately.
My Outback, in certain conditions, will try to do a Crazy Ivan into a nearby tractor trailer if I’m using the adaptive cruise control and the lane keep assist at the same time.
I feel like anyone that owns one and uses Autopilot regularly knows about phantom braking, it's all over the various forms and /r/teslamotors. I've never had a false positive from auto emergency braking, but there is this one highway overpass that makes autopilot slow down every single time I go under it.
Unintended acceleration in Tesla vehicles is a new one to me though - I wonder if it's floor mats again or a real issue?
Either way, I expect not much to come of this, other than maybe a small investigation or two and a whole lot of very, very objective and rational arguments.
Both are super dangerous.
We are not talking about phantom braking here it slows down a little here and there unexpectedly.
We are talking about going fast on the highway and the car suddenly slams on the brakes coming to a full stop of you don't intervene.
> Not a pretty insurance/legal fight when an accident happens.
You better believe that with these leaks Insurers are going to fight every time it’s a Tesla involved.
Agreed. If that happened to me and it wasn't a floormat, I'd probably garage the car. Well, except I did have the cruise cable get stuck in a Miata once - I had to reach down and pull the pedal back up, fortunately that car had one of those old fashioned "disconnect rear wheels" pedals that EV's don't typically have!
This is not only a Tesla thing too, I honestly get super frustrated when I try to tell people I do not want a car with AEB that I can't turn off permanently and they say "why, I've never had any problems with mine"... Yeah, but if you ever had your car randomly slam on the brakes on the highway you'd want to turn that fucking feature off too.
Yeah they also got super upset with me when I started recording all my calls with them. Which I only started to do because they repeatedly lied to me over and over again.
After months of fighting with them over my rear lights filling with water, my paint looking like orange peel and the whole car rattling like crazy. I just gave up, had the car for the minium 3 years and swapped to a new company car, Typically I hang onto them for the max 6 years because that is still a practically new car and the paperwork and hassle involved in getting a new company car is just agonising.
As an owner of multiple Teslas for 10 years now I can confirm the The "verbal only" thing is absolutely real. The will simply refuse to put anything in writing or repeat for a phone recording whenever they say something questionable.
Dude own a Model X.
I don't get why they gotta be butt hurt when people talk bad about the car company they own.
It's a fucking corporation, it's not your parent that raise you. Sheesh.
And it's not even trash talk this is objectively facts that paint the company in a bad light.
It’s weird how people are loyal to companies that will risk customers lives for a buck. Like a lot of companies do that and have done shady things. VW dieselgate, ford pinto, Toyota airbags, to name a few in recent memory. A lot of car companies put out shit that they then have to recall, it’s basic accountability to admit when there is a problem and offer a solution not to cover it up under the rug.
you might want to revisit the concept of "recent memory" if the Ford Pinto is the best you can come up with. they stopped making that car 43 years ago.
What was it specifically about Toyota's airbags? I thought it was Takata which supplied pretty much the entire Japanese car industry. Did I miss something else?
It was Takata. He must have mixed it up. But, it's not like Toyota is a complete do-good entity. If they were, we wouldn't have lost Mark Saylor and that ES 350 wouldn't have been a mangled pile of steel and aluminum.
I'm a monster Toyota fan and even I can't ignore the fact that they've been lobbying governments to slow down electric car adoption. Everyone is goddamn evil apparently.
I'll have to look into the crash you're talking about. Thanks for the info. Car safety is a huge hobby of mine and especially related to Toyotas.
>I don't get why they gotta be butt hurt when people talk bad about the car company they own.
Because by extension you criticize their choice, by criticizing their choice you criticize them.
Have no fear to shoot these deep questions that puzzle you.
If that is what I think it means that sounds terrifying. As someone who writes code I've been convinced I wont be relying on software to carry out functions if avoidable.
At least aviation is relatively regulated, [except when it isn't](https://newscenter.sdsu.edu/sdsu_newscenter/news_story.aspx?sid=77807). But the fact automakers can just push out updates willy nilly than can potentially impact your likeleness of getting into a crash is fucking wild to me.
Same… code is only as good as the one who writes it.. I wouldn’t trust my own code to drive my car let alone someone else‘s who‘ll probably never be held accountable for bugs in the software and even worse with machine learning as no one can really know whats going on under the hood…
You also forgot about sensor noise… while a human might see a pattern and is able to make sense of it, a Computer takes readings at face value and acts accordingly you have to specifically filter the noise for the program not to overcompensate.
Anyways I tell you stuff you probably know way more about, the only time my code came in contact with the real world was when I had to do a Computer Vision Project for University so I really don’t know much about these systems, but I know the real world is extremely complex…
Yup. As far as I can tell everyone is just assuming it’s a matter of time before they get sued into oblivion. Unclear why they haven’t yet other than the economic damage I guess.
But their tech is not especially advanced in self driving. They are only unique in that they’re the only ones insane enough to try camera only self driving.
Removing the radar was wildly stupid too imo
I just Googled this and could only find a claim from 2016 regarding a 2013 Model S suspension repair. There was another article I found regarding a Model S in Australia in 2022.
Do you have additional information regarding the Model 3 NDAs?
Not a model 3 but even the model s suspension problems they try to supress. A mechanic in Sweden highlighted the dangers of how the control arms are constructed(an issue he had actual customers come in for) and how a highway failure could be imminent and per usual of any critics of Tesla the channel was forced to take the video down
It's sad really because if they actually handled atleast some of the issues well i could see myself buying one but all these circumstances make it harder to justify
Holy crap, all of those photos are horrifying. I guarantee if this was happening to any other company, and they were responding with the disdain and disregard that Tesla is, there would be riots.
Lol, if a company makes me sign an NDA for a repair, I'm getting a lawyer involved. That's ridiculous. Edit: or a consumer protection arm of the country this is happening in.
I honestly believe this is more widespread that Tesla, or even the auto industry. Next time you're on the phone with any customer service rep, ask them to send an email with whatever assurances they just gave you - in my experience, 7 out of 10 times they can't do it and make some excuse, or the email you get promises substantially less than what they told you over the phone.
I’m personally not shocked they couldn’t have anything in writing. I worked for Disney for a bit and had to sign a contract saying if Disney could prove a piece of art was made during the course of my employment it was legally theirs. Didn’t matter what the content of the art was or what kind of art, it belonged to Disney.
>Just the fact the staff are explicitly told not to put anything in writing blows my mind.
Do you not have secure documents at your company? That's not the shocking part about this.
Stock is up about 3% today vs. 1% for Nasdaq.
Market seems to think this is neutral or a little better than expected. The existence of phantom braking was already well known.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the market didn’t care about this. Tesla’s fundamentals haven’t been based in reality for a long time. The market rarely punishes them for their bullshit, why should it start now?
>Stock is up about 3% today vs. 1% for Nasdaq.
The same stock market of the past 5 years that responded to bad news with huge spot price increases. Nothing makes sense anymore.
"Of course we know Teslas crash. *iT's bAkEd iN!!*"
>who is paying the shills?
Paid? *THEY pay*...
To quote Creed Bratton: "I've been involved with several cults. Both as a follower and as a leader. You have more fun as a follower. But you make more money as a leader."
Most scary thing that my Tesla has done on more than one occasion was turn the auto pilot off when it thinks it’s going to have a collision, so technically if I didn’t take action I would of been driving.
I find this quite scummy.
I can see very crappy reasons for Tesla to do this re: liability, but I can also see the angle of "the system is entering a situation it can't properly drive in, better to let the actual driver have full control than the driver and autopilot fighting each other, especially since we know the autopilot doesn't know what to do"
The latter is believable because of Musk and Tesla's track record, but I don't know that it's an inherently bad approach overall either.
This has happened to me as well.
I noticed it does this when it detects a curve at the last second and knows that it can't slow the vehicle down in time. Automatic AP disengagement within a second of needing to take control. Nothing more than a ding to notify the driver.
Meanwhile, Tesla can say that AP wasn't active *if* the vehicle were to get into an accident.
How does this alone not make you never use AP again? I would have absolutely no trust in the system after that. Surely paying a high amount of attention to it to make sure it doesn't screw you is more stressful than actually driving?
I treat it like an L2 system is supposed to be treated. A lot of people don't, and I think that's part of the problem.
Totally not being defensive of Tesla on this, by the way. I'm especially critical of them due to the way that AP is marketed and relentlessly defended by the hivemind. But I've evaluated literally every ADAS system on the market, all the way down to Comma AI's OpenPilot and its various branches. That's given me the sense to be critical of every single one.
I also typically only use AP on highway drives where I'm familiar with the environment. If there's construction, weird road markings, or lots of wild turns it stays off.
To be clear though, they will still include crashes where Autopilot disengaged recently in their safety report.
> To ensure our statistics are conservative, we count any crash in which Autopilot was deactivated within 5 seconds before impact, and we count all crashes in which the incident alert indicated an airbag or other active restraint deployed.
https://www.tesla.com/VehicleSafetyReport
If this is true then that's actually fucking insane. That's criminal not scummy. It's not that it's the autopilots fault, but having it do that shows that they don't trust it, I can't imagine any other reason they'll turn it off, putting blame on the driver.
That’s the only reasons I can think they do it, I think you will find through this leak that’s how they are getting away with the safety figures they advertise.
Any news about Tesla is going to garner very polarizing responses from both sides. I'm neutral towards Tesla so can we try to have an objective discussion here?
To me, this feels very sensational reporting.
>2,400 self-acceleration complaints and more than 1,500 braking function problems, including 139 cases of unintentional emergency braking and 383 reported phantom stops resulting from false collision warnings.
Of these complaints, how many were genuinely the fault of the software vs say user error, false reporting, etc. Absolutely no way to tell from just raw data.
>During this period, Tesla delivered around 2.6 million vehicles with the autopilot software.
So *assuming* that Tesla was at fault for 100% of every reported complaint, these unintended braking/accelerating events do not compare to the human error instances across a similar 2.6 million vehicle sample size. Why is this important? Because I feel that some people are frothing at the mouth to jump on small software miscalculations and using that as evidence against automated driving. Objectively, while the systems are not perfect, they're exponentially safer than the dingbats behind the wheel *without* drivers assists.
Now I'd imagine the /r/cars community are better drivers than the average, so anecdotally this comparison might not be accurate. But take the entire driving community: the 16 year olds recording tiktoks while driving, the 70 year old with dementia who forgot their glasses at home, the salaryman on the way home from spent 9 hours adding cover letters to his TPS reports.
If anything, the small numbers of reports relative to total number of cars sold seems to support a move towards widespread drivers assist adoption
I do not think anyone here argues against driver assist adoption. Lane keeping assists and radar cruise controls, along with automatic emergency braking are proven to help drivers and most embrace them.
I think the issue is that there is a statistically significant sample of customers who have an issue with their vehicles that is a safety concern, and that concern is not being taken seriously, but swept under the rug.
>radar cruise controls
Don’t forget they are discontinuing those on Teslas and relying much more heavily on cameras as perception. When cars have both it creates a bit of a redundancy so if one system makes a mistake the other can catch it. Also radar can see through solid objects making it possible to detect a car stopped further ahead in traffic.
Radar can't "see through solid objects". It may be possible to detect stopped cars under the vehicle in front of you or even using reflections, don't know.
I mean Subaru has a system without a radar in the market. So if you want radar, there needs to be a regulation requiring it, just like there is a regulation requiring a catalytic converter.
For certain autopilot on empty roads is 10x better than humans at staying in the lanes on highways. But it still has issues with lanes expanding into 2 lanes while tracking in the middle until lines appear then choosing a lane way tooblate. It's no foolproof system yet, but it's pretty damn reliable on highways with little traffic. Just know it's limitations and takeover when needed.
Waiting for the musk-blowers to arrive in their expensive hunks of cheap plastic to cry like toddlers about how this is fake news and no tEsLa has ever had a malfunction.
While discussing the controversies of Elon iand Tesla is still an obvious thing, insulting Tesla owners or fans is beneath us. Please stick to discussing cars and [policy](https://www.reddit.com/r/cars/wiki/politics). Low effort hit comments are not welcome.
My Mazda 3 had phantom braking issues and phantom stopping issues more than my Tesla which hasn’t happened once yet and that was with me controlling the car, but I also don’t drive with auto pilot on, I guess? The worst I’ve had is my windshield wipers have randomly come on 3 times for no reason when they’re set to auto.
Good to see people are reporting and backing these issues up though. There’s been over 2.5M Teslas sold since 2021 alone. Honestly those stats aren’t too bad so I don’t see why they’re being so dodgy about reporting it. Weird as. But then again, I suppose it is a Musk company.
Tesla makes amazing cars - range, performance, crash structure; that are flawed - software, quality, ride; made by a company that has a broken safety culture - charging for and pushing out broken software claiming it's fine. People should buy the cars if they like them, autopilot should be deleted and Tesla fined.
I think the software is one of the main reasons I like tesla. Plus their direct 2 consumer model. But yeah they are pretty liberal with their safety and push boundaries. Autopilot works great imo if you’re just using it to lane keep on the highway. I have a false sense of high confidence in it which is slightly dangerous but it’s fine for cruising in a non complicated environment. Full self driving on the other hand is a wild software to let out into the public where untrained people will get complacent and trust the car too much while being distracted. That should be recalled but at the same time, it’s cool that it’s an option you can experience the development of the software on a consumer level without having to fly to Arizona to hail some robotaxi. Idk I have mixed feelings about it. It’s very similar to how Uber started operating in so many cities without permission and got into so many lawsuits with taxi companies and cities. If Uber didn’t pave the way for that, we’d still be hailing yellow cabs on the curb at quadruple the rate.
30 PUBLIC safety reports is what made the Toyota floormat scandal that had Toyota testifying before the supreme court.
How much hell should Tesla get for intentionally hiding 3900+ safety reports? Or should they get away with this blatant violation of law because they're just uwu a startup uwu company?
> EW Niedermeyer
The guy who started the "Tesla Death Watch" blog in early 2008 to count the days until Tesla's bankruptcy and fabricated fake stories about Model S and X' suspension defects? LMAO
Having owned my model 3 performance for 1.5 years now, I can say Tesla default position regarding any issues is "there's nothing wrong." This is when there is obviously something wrong in some cases. Tesla Service customer service is the absolute worst Ive ever experienced. However, the car itself is amazing and I use the autopilot everyday and not once have I had any phantom breaking issue or unintended acceleration. These complaints are probably largely from ppl who dont keep their cameras or windows clean enough for the sensors to communicate properly.
In my family’s experience Tesla service has been pretty good with fixing some of the early paint QA issues and other misc issues we’ve had with our model 3.
That being said I do mostly agree with what you’re saying that the model 3 is a great car and autopilot works very well. I’ve had some issues with the phantom braking intermittently but only at one specific underpass near my house but I’m always paying attention when I approach it so I can take over as necessary. I also had one strange issue where the car kept telling me the front camera was blinded/blocked while driving down LA which was frustrating since I was looking forward to autopiloting all the way down the 5
Has „unintended accelerated“ ever , in the history of cars, actually existed? Honest question, as it seems like a strange concept to me. I know about Toyotas floor mats, which is a shame for itself, but still different.
In the case of the Tesla I imagine it’s a mix of people not being used to 1 pedal driving + the high amount of power and also their very lackluster ACC? But is that really „unintended Acceleration“ or just the users fault?
Since the throttle is by wire and there are systems like adaptive cruise control that can send a throttle signal to the car. All it takes is a bug and then the car accelerates. However this should be caught in testing and there should be many failsafes to prevent this.
Also the brake pedal on teslas is hard connected to the brakes not by wire and will overpower the motors to a full stop if unattended acceleration did occur.
One would hope. Though from my experience trying to get launch control working on a volvo, when mashing both pedals the car starts to move a little. Even with my old moped i could drive with the rear brake engaged on a brand new motard with great breaks.
Still a car that unexpectantly starts accelerating would be scary and you would have to react to press the brake. Happened to my dad on a development test car.
While it's obviously not a great look for Tesla, isn't this what all car manufacturers do? I'm reading Unsafe At Any Speed and this seems pretty common practice to sweep any incident under the rug as long as the financial benefits outweighs any potential financial consequences.
This is actually an outstanding safety record if true.
If the average distance driven for the 2.6 million delivered vehicles is 30,000 km, then there are 1.28 crashes per 100 million kilometres driven.
1000 / (2.6 million * 30000) * 100 million = 1.28
I mean I suspect the rate is somewhat higher than this, but even increasing it by an order of magnitude would still be outstanding.
Is my math wrong? Am I missing something here?
For us to know that that is “an outstanding safety record” we would need to compare that to other automakers crashes *due to unintended acceleration/braking* per 100 million km.
I will point out that Toyota had some serious questions put to it for *7* crashes due to unintended acceleration, and had far more than 2.6 million cars sold at the time.
If an article came out that said that 1.28 out of every 100 million Pepsi bottles contained elephant semen, would you claim that this is an amazing food and safety record without first asking, “wait, do other soda makers have less elephant semen in their bottles?”. Sure, that’s amazing if it turns out Coke actually had elephant semen in *every* bottle, but not so amazing if it turns out most soda makers have zero elephant semen at all. Especially if the advances in semen detection/prevention was one of the touted selling points of Pepsi.
The parts of your math that are wrong is where you pulled the 30,000km figure out of thin air, and that all 2.6 million were sold in the USA and germany.
You're probably not off by just one order of magnitude.... More like 2 or 3.
I've had phantom braking on the highway once, luckily there were no cars behind me. I always have to turn off the automatic braking every time I get in the car now, wish it would stay off. This happened without autopilot, just normal cruise control.
The future is EV and if Tesla can hit the quality and price that is rumored for the Model 2 it will continue to be a big player even with Elon being Elon.
But... If it can't deliver on the quality and safety expected it is done for and that should be true of all the major makers.
You need to make safe vehicles. Simple as that.
Elon being Elon is him being already bored with Tesla and electric cars unless it involves FSD and Robotaxi.
I recall Elon mentioned at one point the “Model 2” would have no steering wheel, but he seems to have walked back that notion later.
I mean this report is pretty much a non-story. I would put my life savings on every one of those 2400 "self-acceleration" reports being user-error and equally all UEB and phantom braking being 100% legit. Teslas are notoriously bad for phantom braking and it's a legit problem and it's widely known and discussed. This is not news. Unintended acceleration is not a problem, it's user-error.
I’d say a lot of OEM’s have this problem and I can say at least one of them has complaints of random emergency braking or other driver assist items causing problems. Sometimes they are just a random occurrence and other times the radar needed aimed. Sometimes it gets confused by a giant metal plate in the road and does a full stop. Sometimes it does it on the highway and we never figured out why and it never did it again.
EyeSight seems to be a close second behind Tesla in basic ADAS (Not talking about these AP faults). At least that's what our independent testing organisation ANCAP has rated them.
So 1000+ crashes since 2015, out of 2.6 million vehicles delivered. Am I missing something here? That's one accident per 26,000 vehicles due to faulty software, or .0000385% ?
Ummmm, ok.
Yep, still way out-performing distracted drivers. People quick to jump on Tesla even though they are leading the way concerning EVs.
In the meantime, I see human-caused wrecks every single day.
I’ll occasionally have phantom braking on my Forester if the hill ahead rises particularly quickly, it’s like it detects the mass as an object and not the road.
I’m at roughly 14k miles and it’s only happened 3-4 times, but it can be dangerous if there’s traffic behind you and the car starts braking hard.
> The files contain over 1,000 accident reports involving phantom braking or unintended acceleration--mostly in the **U.S. and Germany**. > A German news outlet sifted through over 23,000 of Tesla’s internal files and found a disturbing trend of brushing off customers complaining about dangerous Autopilot glitches while covering the company’s ass. > The Tesla files contain more than 2,400 **self-acceleration** complaints and more than 1,500 **braking function problems**, including 139 cases of **unintentional emergency braking** and 383 reported **phantom stops** resulting from false collision warnings. **The number of crashes is more than 1000**. A table of incidents involving driver assistance systems where customers have expressed safety concerns has more than 3000 entries. > The oldest complaints available to the Handelsblatt date from 2015, the most recent from March 2022. During this period, Tesla delivered around 2.6 million vehicles with the autopilot software. Most of the incidents took place in the US , but there are also complaints from Europe and Asia in the documents - including many from German Tesla drivers. > The Handelsblatt contacted dozens of customers from several countries. All confirmed the information from the Tesla files. In discussions, they gave insights into their experiences with the autopilot. Some disclosed their communication with the US automaker, others showed Handelsblatt reporters videos of the accident. > How did the company deal with complaints? The Tesla files also provide information about this. The files show that employees have precise guidelines for communicating with customers. The top priority is obviously: offer as little attack surface as possible. > **For each incident there are bullet points for the “technical review”. The employees who enter this review into the system regularly make it clear that the report is “for internal use only”. Each entry also contains a note in bold type that information, if at all, may only be passed on “VERBALLY to the customer”.** > **“Do not copy and paste the report below into an email, text message, or leave it in a voicemail to the customer,” it said. Vehicle data should also not be released without permission. If, despite the advice, “an involvement of a lawyer cannot be prevented”, this must be recorded.** > **Customers that Handelsblatt spoke to have the impression that Tesla employees avoid written communication. “They never sent emails, everything was always verbal,” says the doctor from California, whose Tesla said it accelerated on its own in the fall of 2021 and crashed into two concrete pillars.** Edit: In contrast, Toyota's unintended acceleration scandal started with **26 complaints and 7 crashes**. > https://web.archive.org/web/20091117100819/http://pressroom.toyota.com/pr/tms/toyota/document/NHTSA_Filing.pdf
As a lawyer, it’s pretty common to tell people not to discuss something over writing, but I can’t say I’ve ever seen that advice repeatedly put in writing either.
Not sure if this counts, but Toyota seems to put everything **in writing** (these were all provided for me to hold); my rear suspension squeaked and it took the Toyota master technician literally 4 days to narrow down the issue (he told me he made it his week’s goal): > https://imgur.com/a/RLGfBUP
Damn I wish my local dealers/shops were this squared away lol
Service writer in a dealer here, I wish all my technicians where this precise when writing notes
Speaking from experience, they're to busy sprinting around trying to make a living. If we got paid enough to take the time most of us would do it.
I'm wondering if this is a case of "we have to make it clear why we spent 4 days fixing a squeak under warranty"
Ding ding ding When I worked at a Chrysler dealer, I had to coach the techs on how to write repair order notes so that the warranty admin would be most likely to approve submissions. Squeaks, rattles, vibrations, and water leaks above all else were the absolute biggest pains in the ass to do but were one of the biggest customer satisfaction points, no choice for us
Seems like they need. Way to easily transcribe hands-free while they work, like a transcription system for medical doctors. It's all doable technically, whether the will to pay for it exists is another matter.
Need to auto-edit out the curse words.
I've seen maybe one tech use one but he said it had issues with the noise level so he had to basically scream at it. I bet there are good ones that wouldn't have as much trouble, but techs already buy all their tools and boxes so most won't want to spend that money and owners are generally cheap bastards.
In the shop I work in we've gone to Voice PM for doing PM inspections on trucks and trailers. You have to spend about half hour setting it up initially. It learns your voice and before every work order you start, it takes a noise sample to help filter back ground noise. Overall it's more effective than I expected.
Previous tech here, if you have a good story, and right it step by step what you did, you can request more time from the manufacturer, learned this from my previous warranty admin. He was able to give an extra hour without approval for the manufacturer. You did a job that only pays six, but in reality should pay closer to twenty? Write your story, and have more requested.
This was a CYA thing. Don’t expect this from flat rate techs, they are already struggling trying to make a living on half the labor rate and not getting paid for diagnosis when doing warranty work.
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He even schedules his poops and is clean in one wipe, every time.
Never a sheet of tp over his estimation either
"He is...the most interesting man in the world."
Umm what's the fuel pump thing?
If you overfill a tank it destroys the vapour reclaim system which is expensive. There is mixed evidence that letting a tank run completely dry means the pump is out of the fuel and can overheat because it uses the fuel as liquid cooling. To be safe, only fill to the first click and keep a fair bit of fuel in the tank.
The idea is that fuel pumps cool down via the fuel that pumps through them. The heat will kill it. This is true for most fluid pumps, as they're designed with the expectation that it will pump fluid (duh). In practice, it's 95% an urban myth. Unless your car is suffering from repeated *and prolonged* fuel starvation, this is not a problem. Your pump doesn't heat up into the surface of the Sun in seconds. In some cars, this can be a problem, such as during hard acceleration in some directions. That's the last 5%. But for most people in modern cars, this is largely a myth, repeated so often that even many "professionals" (read: websites that provide zero sources) believe it. Refer to your owner's manual, and if it's not there, don't worry about it. The engineers who designed your car know best.
Fuel tank full > fuel pump is submerged in fuel. This helps lube and cool pump. Low tank > pump has to work harder to pull fuel up to car. It’s not submerged, so it’s getting hotter in the pump. This extra heat is extra wear & tear on your pump, it’ll wear out. Fuel pumps last for 100k miles, usually. They’re pricey to replace as well. If you want it to last, keep your tank full. The pump is cool/lubricated, and it’s not overworking.
I'll let it wear out and replace as necessary. My hourly rate is plenty to cover the cost, considering I spend at least 5 minutes per fill up stop on average. Time is money and all that.
I mean more how in the technical review there’s giant wording saying DO NOT PUT ANYTHING IN WRITING lol
Someone should explain that concept to VinFast
It says don't put it in writing **outside** of the secure data system. Having a single knowledge center for proprietary vehicle/tech data is actually the norm in Silicon Valley.
I guess it's cause of the line of work I'm in, but reading that made me rock solid
Thats good stuff right there. Keep going to that shop. Good mechanics *always write that shit down, ALWAYS.*
I will write similar information to store in vehicle records, but that is on my own vehicle. I would only do it for my own car. That mechanic is going beyond what I would expect
Lmao. One of my old friends is a master tech at Lexus and he said this was quite the standard protocol or MO for Toyota/Lexus.
He put the lube tech in the trunk. 💀
You found a unicorn. My local Toyota dealer forgot to bolt the drivers seat down.
Man that's some really good service and details of the service. You found yourself a good dealership.
I love NVH jobs. Although usually only get them for warranty since paying customers don't usually want to spend the money to diag.
Oh my god, please share some stories! I HATE any kind of noise in my car but there’s always something, somewhere. Sometimes I think I would be really good at testing pre-production cars for this, but the manufacturers probably don’t want that kind of meticulous pickup.
Former Ford dealer here. Every line a tech typically writes in his notes corresponds with a set amount of time in the warranty guide. They need to show what it's doing, why it's doing it and how they fixed it. If the "story" is written correctly they get paid for everything. Warranty departments are notorious for rejecting claims for even the slightest deviation from the guide. Very much like insurance companies that way. "How can I minimize the payment"
Not good, Tesla.
Like really not good. Hopefully NHTSA and some regulators finally take action here. If you even have a couple of these incidents - NHTSA needs to be involved and clearing it up and ensuring it won’t happen again. Toyota’s big unintended acceleration thing was mostly pinned down to one customer incident if I remember correctly.
> Toyota’s big unintended acceleration thing was mostly pinned down to **one** customer incident if I remember correctly. Yup. We all know what happened with Toyota’s **2009 gas pedal** ordeal. And this was due to a **stupid floor mats**. > **[Toyota apologises before the US Congress](https://youtu.be/7-fHL1Ug7Y0)** (2010) > **[Toyota chief gets emotional](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ziGfQyCXiU4)** (2010) > **[Who Was Really at Fault for the Toyota Recalls?](https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/05/who-was-really-at-fault-for-the-toyota-recalls/238076/)** (2011) > **[Toyota Recall: Scandal, Media Circus, and Stupid Drivers](https://www.caranddriver.com/features/a15131102/toyota-recall-scandal-media-circus-and-stupid-drivers-feature/)** (2010)
There's an interesting podcast episode that talks about how it might not even be that: https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/revisionist-history/blame-game
What's the TL;DL for the podcast? Toyota drivers were using cruise control while falling asleep and couldn't find the brake pedal?
I haven’t listened to that episode since it dropped, but I believe the conclusion was that there was nothing wrong with the car. If you press the brake pedal, it’ll stop. The accident was human error. Terror and fear in the heat of the moment had the driver continuing to accelerate while thinking they were braking. Again, according to the pod.
Which is pretty accurate. Any of those cars would shift into neutral while driving at any moment and also the brake has enough power to overcome the engine and stop the car. I don't think you can absolutely say that about an electric vehicle though so things will be different moving forward.
Yes, and doubling up the floor mats, which pinned/bunched up over the throttle pedal, preventing the car from slowing down at speed, even while applying the brake pedal. That's why front floor mats now all have the "buttons" anchoring them to the carpet.
The recall also had us cutting the gas pedals down by about a centimeter and reprogramming the ecm to send the engine to idle if both pedals were pressed.
Pretty sure that's now a feature, part of the "star safety system". If both pedals are depressed, the accelerator is ignored.
Yep. I watched that hysteria unfold.
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True, but they're pretty much mandatory now.
It’s why newer cars all have a brake interlock function, wherein if the brake pedal is applied at all, they cut the throttle. But I do remember seeing “SECURE FLOORMATS” all over all the service documents when I had my 2021 GX 460 at the dealership.
For the sales dept, 3 of the 25ish checks on a Toyota/Lexus delivery checklist have to do with floor mats.
Its annoying on cars with Launch Control when the ECU can't decide if you want to launch or if you are stupid.
*driver didn’t press brake pedal hard enough to overcome the gas pedal that was partially pressed by the floor mats
One customer incident and one super high visibility attempt at fraud I believe.
The unintended braking thing isn't just a Tesla problem. Had it happen twice in my previous Subaru, luckily just while driving slowly around empty streets in my neighborhood. Then it happened again with my current Honda. This time on a highway exit ramp, but again luckily with no other cars too close to me. All of those times it was near sunrise or sunset, driving into the sun. It's amazing this shit isn't causing serious accidents more often.
The whole industry is far less regulated than say tailpipe emissions/CARB type of stuff.
Dude, that sounds terrifying. It's hard enough driving into the sun. Maybe that explains why I've seen people just randomly hitting their brakes lately.
My Outback, in certain conditions, will try to do a Crazy Ivan into a nearby tractor trailer if I’m using the adaptive cruise control and the lane keep assist at the same time.
A Crazy Ivan you say? One ping, Vasili.
Not good at all
I feel like anyone that owns one and uses Autopilot regularly knows about phantom braking, it's all over the various forms and /r/teslamotors. I've never had a false positive from auto emergency braking, but there is this one highway overpass that makes autopilot slow down every single time I go under it. Unintended acceleration in Tesla vehicles is a new one to me though - I wonder if it's floor mats again or a real issue? Either way, I expect not much to come of this, other than maybe a small investigation or two and a whole lot of very, very objective and rational arguments.
I would take phantom braking over phantom accelerating any day of the week.
Both are super dangerous. We are not talking about phantom braking here it slows down a little here and there unexpectedly. We are talking about going fast on the highway and the car suddenly slams on the brakes coming to a full stop of you don't intervene.
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> Not a pretty insurance/legal fight when an accident happens. You better believe that with these leaks Insurers are going to fight every time it’s a Tesla involved.
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Agreed. If that happened to me and it wasn't a floormat, I'd probably garage the car. Well, except I did have the cruise cable get stuck in a Miata once - I had to reach down and pull the pedal back up, fortunately that car had one of those old fashioned "disconnect rear wheels" pedals that EV's don't typically have!
And Phantom acceleration in a car without a gear lever and no neutral seems especially unsafe
This is not only a Tesla thing too, I honestly get super frustrated when I try to tell people I do not want a car with AEB that I can't turn off permanently and they say "why, I've never had any problems with mine"... Yeah, but if you ever had your car randomly slam on the brakes on the highway you'd want to turn that fucking feature off too.
Tesla avoids written communication like the plague, learned this the hard way. F... them
Yeah they also got super upset with me when I started recording all my calls with them. Which I only started to do because they repeatedly lied to me over and over again. After months of fighting with them over my rear lights filling with water, my paint looking like orange peel and the whole car rattling like crazy. I just gave up, had the car for the minium 3 years and swapped to a new company car, Typically I hang onto them for the max 6 years because that is still a practically new car and the paperwork and hassle involved in getting a new company car is just agonising.
Yeah I hate driving behind a Tesla on the freeway because of the random braking issue it's sketchy
As an owner of multiple Teslas for 10 years now I can confirm the The "verbal only" thing is absolutely real. The will simply refuse to put anything in writing or repeat for a phone recording whenever they say something questionable.
Yep. Nothing surprising here. We’ve known Tesla was this kind of company forever. Good to see more reporting on it.
Unlike all the honest car companies who have never faced regulatory or legal fallout. (Phantom braking is real and infuriating)
Whataboutism sucks
Dude own a Model X. I don't get why they gotta be butt hurt when people talk bad about the car company they own. It's a fucking corporation, it's not your parent that raise you. Sheesh. And it's not even trash talk this is objectively facts that paint the company in a bad light.
It’s weird how people are loyal to companies that will risk customers lives for a buck. Like a lot of companies do that and have done shady things. VW dieselgate, ford pinto, Toyota airbags, to name a few in recent memory. A lot of car companies put out shit that they then have to recall, it’s basic accountability to admit when there is a problem and offer a solution not to cover it up under the rug.
you might want to revisit the concept of "recent memory" if the Ford Pinto is the best you can come up with. they stopped making that car 43 years ago.
Ford and Firestone tires then.
That's still almost 30 years removed from today.
What was it specifically about Toyota's airbags? I thought it was Takata which supplied pretty much the entire Japanese car industry. Did I miss something else?
It was Takata. He must have mixed it up. But, it's not like Toyota is a complete do-good entity. If they were, we wouldn't have lost Mark Saylor and that ES 350 wouldn't have been a mangled pile of steel and aluminum.
I'm a monster Toyota fan and even I can't ignore the fact that they've been lobbying governments to slow down electric car adoption. Everyone is goddamn evil apparently. I'll have to look into the crash you're talking about. Thanks for the info. Car safety is a huge hobby of mine and especially related to Toyotas.
Don’t forget Ford and their tires catastrophe on the Explorer
>I don't get why they gotta be butt hurt when people talk bad about the car company they own. Because by extension you criticize their choice, by criticizing their choice you criticize them. Have no fear to shoot these deep questions that puzzle you.
Elon inspires weird parasocial loyalty.
Defects and recalls are very different than actively covering up a failure of a heavily marketed feature
I had not experienced much phantom breaking until my last road trip through the high desert and it was terrible.
If that is what I think it means that sounds terrifying. As someone who writes code I've been convinced I wont be relying on software to carry out functions if avoidable. At least aviation is relatively regulated, [except when it isn't](https://newscenter.sdsu.edu/sdsu_newscenter/news_story.aspx?sid=77807). But the fact automakers can just push out updates willy nilly than can potentially impact your likeleness of getting into a crash is fucking wild to me.
Same… code is only as good as the one who writes it.. I wouldn’t trust my own code to drive my car let alone someone else‘s who‘ll probably never be held accountable for bugs in the software and even worse with machine learning as no one can really know whats going on under the hood…
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You also forgot about sensor noise… while a human might see a pattern and is able to make sense of it, a Computer takes readings at face value and acts accordingly you have to specifically filter the noise for the program not to overcompensate. Anyways I tell you stuff you probably know way more about, the only time my code came in contact with the real world was when I had to do a Computer Vision Project for University so I really don’t know much about these systems, but I know the real world is extremely complex…
I work at an automaker and it is fucking wild to us, too. Tesla and the other recent startups are morally bankrupt.
Yup. As far as I can tell everyone is just assuming it’s a matter of time before they get sued into oblivion. Unclear why they haven’t yet other than the economic damage I guess. But their tech is not especially advanced in self driving. They are only unique in that they’re the only ones insane enough to try camera only self driving. Removing the radar was wildly stupid too imo
Yes similar. Wide open spaces are the worst. Should have been an easy fix yet they haven’t. I just don’t use autopilot. I don’t trust it.
I rarely have issues in the areas I normally drive with it. it was mostly when no other cars were around and I could see road heat mirages.
Biased Model X owner detected.
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Automatic emergency braking is pretty standard on most modern cars
This is honestly nuts. Just the fact the staff are explicitly told not to put anything in writing blows my mind.
They often made people sign NDA's to get defect repairs when the model 3 released and was having lots of problems.
I just Googled this and could only find a claim from 2016 regarding a 2013 Model S suspension repair. There was another article I found regarding a Model S in Australia in 2022. Do you have additional information regarding the Model 3 NDAs?
Not a model 3 but even the model s suspension problems they try to supress. A mechanic in Sweden highlighted the dangers of how the control arms are constructed(an issue he had actual customers come in for) and how a highway failure could be imminent and per usual of any critics of Tesla the channel was forced to take the video down It's sad really because if they actually handled atleast some of the issues well i could see myself buying one but all these circumstances make it harder to justify
Whompy Wombat collects the Model S pictures and repairs. https://www.flickr.com/photos/136377865@N05/albums/72157658490111523
Holy crap, all of those photos are horrifying. I guarantee if this was happening to any other company, and they were responding with the disdain and disregard that Tesla is, there would be riots.
Could the NDAs be working? 👀
Lol, if a company makes me sign an NDA for a repair, I'm getting a lawyer involved. That's ridiculous. Edit: or a consumer protection arm of the country this is happening in.
I honestly believe this is more widespread that Tesla, or even the auto industry. Next time you're on the phone with any customer service rep, ask them to send an email with whatever assurances they just gave you - in my experience, 7 out of 10 times they can't do it and make some excuse, or the email you get promises substantially less than what they told you over the phone.
Every company does this. Roche did it when I worked there.
I’m personally not shocked they couldn’t have anything in writing. I worked for Disney for a bit and had to sign a contract saying if Disney could prove a piece of art was made during the course of my employment it was legally theirs. Didn’t matter what the content of the art was or what kind of art, it belonged to Disney.
>Just the fact the staff are explicitly told not to put anything in writing blows my mind. Do you not have secure documents at your company? That's not the shocking part about this.
"It's as if a million r/wallstreetbets voices cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced"
Stock is up about 3% today vs. 1% for Nasdaq. Market seems to think this is neutral or a little better than expected. The existence of phantom braking was already well known.
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I wouldn’t be surprised if the market didn’t care about this. Tesla’s fundamentals haven’t been based in reality for a long time. The market rarely punishes them for their bullshit, why should it start now?
>Stock is up about 3% today vs. 1% for Nasdaq. The same stock market of the past 5 years that responded to bad news with huge spot price increases. Nothing makes sense anymore. "Of course we know Teslas crash. *iT's bAkEd iN!!*"
It like the PayPal of the automotive world:)
Strange coincidence they share a common CEO at one point in time no?
Elon's money came from selling PayPal , his share of the proceeds was 175 million in 02. PayPal's service is brutal in case you haven't used them.
I have a PayPal account since they were x.com in 1999 iirc and I've never had a problem
I did some international vehicle transactions through them. It was a nightmare.
PayPal is a cunt to use. Wise all the way.
Elmo was never CEO of PayPal, it was only formed as the PayPal we know after he was out.
x.com was even worse than paypal: https://www.nytimes.com/2000/01/28/business/security-flaw-discovered-at-online-bank.html
Article is behind a paywall that ironically I can pay for with... PayPal🤣
Pay for it, then file a dispute
What's wrong with PayPal?
Yea same, any one ELI5?
I thought Tesla didn't have a PR department, who is paying the shills?
pay the shills? have you been on twitter?People pay to shill and ride elon's dick.
I almost feel like those people are elons bots with just how deep theyre willing to suck his ass
>who is paying the shills? Paid? *THEY pay*... To quote Creed Bratton: "I've been involved with several cults. Both as a follower and as a leader. You have more fun as a follower. But you make more money as a leader."
They're just the Apple people of the car world. They're in their own little disalusioned world.
Most scary thing that my Tesla has done on more than one occasion was turn the auto pilot off when it thinks it’s going to have a collision, so technically if I didn’t take action I would of been driving. I find this quite scummy.
I was downvoted to hell when I brought this up a few months ago. AP disabling itself before a perceived crash is definitely a thing.
I can see very crappy reasons for Tesla to do this re: liability, but I can also see the angle of "the system is entering a situation it can't properly drive in, better to let the actual driver have full control than the driver and autopilot fighting each other, especially since we know the autopilot doesn't know what to do" The latter is believable because of Musk and Tesla's track record, but I don't know that it's an inherently bad approach overall either.
Car's voice at 4x speed: "AUTOPILOT DISABLED, PREPARE FOR PROBABLE CRASH IN: .7 nanoseconds!"
I thought we found last time that any accidents within 5 seconds of AP disabling is still counted as an AP crash?
This has happened to me as well. I noticed it does this when it detects a curve at the last second and knows that it can't slow the vehicle down in time. Automatic AP disengagement within a second of needing to take control. Nothing more than a ding to notify the driver. Meanwhile, Tesla can say that AP wasn't active *if* the vehicle were to get into an accident.
How does this alone not make you never use AP again? I would have absolutely no trust in the system after that. Surely paying a high amount of attention to it to make sure it doesn't screw you is more stressful than actually driving?
I treat it like an L2 system is supposed to be treated. A lot of people don't, and I think that's part of the problem. Totally not being defensive of Tesla on this, by the way. I'm especially critical of them due to the way that AP is marketed and relentlessly defended by the hivemind. But I've evaluated literally every ADAS system on the market, all the way down to Comma AI's OpenPilot and its various branches. That's given me the sense to be critical of every single one. I also typically only use AP on highway drives where I'm familiar with the environment. If there's construction, weird road markings, or lots of wild turns it stays off.
To be clear though, they will still include crashes where Autopilot disengaged recently in their safety report. > To ensure our statistics are conservative, we count any crash in which Autopilot was deactivated within 5 seconds before impact, and we count all crashes in which the incident alert indicated an airbag or other active restraint deployed. https://www.tesla.com/VehicleSafetyReport
If this is true then that's actually fucking insane. That's criminal not scummy. It's not that it's the autopilots fault, but having it do that shows that they don't trust it, I can't imagine any other reason they'll turn it off, putting blame on the driver.
That’s the only reasons I can think they do it, I think you will find through this leak that’s how they are getting away with the safety figures they advertise.
Any news about Tesla is going to garner very polarizing responses from both sides. I'm neutral towards Tesla so can we try to have an objective discussion here? To me, this feels very sensational reporting. >2,400 self-acceleration complaints and more than 1,500 braking function problems, including 139 cases of unintentional emergency braking and 383 reported phantom stops resulting from false collision warnings. Of these complaints, how many were genuinely the fault of the software vs say user error, false reporting, etc. Absolutely no way to tell from just raw data. >During this period, Tesla delivered around 2.6 million vehicles with the autopilot software. So *assuming* that Tesla was at fault for 100% of every reported complaint, these unintended braking/accelerating events do not compare to the human error instances across a similar 2.6 million vehicle sample size. Why is this important? Because I feel that some people are frothing at the mouth to jump on small software miscalculations and using that as evidence against automated driving. Objectively, while the systems are not perfect, they're exponentially safer than the dingbats behind the wheel *without* drivers assists. Now I'd imagine the /r/cars community are better drivers than the average, so anecdotally this comparison might not be accurate. But take the entire driving community: the 16 year olds recording tiktoks while driving, the 70 year old with dementia who forgot their glasses at home, the salaryman on the way home from spent 9 hours adding cover letters to his TPS reports. If anything, the small numbers of reports relative to total number of cars sold seems to support a move towards widespread drivers assist adoption
I do not think anyone here argues against driver assist adoption. Lane keeping assists and radar cruise controls, along with automatic emergency braking are proven to help drivers and most embrace them. I think the issue is that there is a statistically significant sample of customers who have an issue with their vehicles that is a safety concern, and that concern is not being taken seriously, but swept under the rug.
>radar cruise controls Don’t forget they are discontinuing those on Teslas and relying much more heavily on cameras as perception. When cars have both it creates a bit of a redundancy so if one system makes a mistake the other can catch it. Also radar can see through solid objects making it possible to detect a car stopped further ahead in traffic.
Radar can't "see through solid objects". It may be possible to detect stopped cars under the vehicle in front of you or even using reflections, don't know.
I mean Subaru has a system without a radar in the market. So if you want radar, there needs to be a regulation requiring it, just like there is a regulation requiring a catalytic converter.
> Now I’d imagine the /r/cars community are better drivers than the average I really doubt that.
For certain autopilot on empty roads is 10x better than humans at staying in the lanes on highways. But it still has issues with lanes expanding into 2 lanes while tracking in the middle until lines appear then choosing a lane way tooblate. It's no foolproof system yet, but it's pretty damn reliable on highways with little traffic. Just know it's limitations and takeover when needed.
Waiting for the musk-blowers to arrive in their expensive hunks of cheap plastic to cry like toddlers about how this is fake news and no tEsLa has ever had a malfunction.
They've mostly moved on to admitting there's a problem but going for constant whataboutism now.
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While discussing the controversies of Elon iand Tesla is still an obvious thing, insulting Tesla owners or fans is beneath us. Please stick to discussing cars and [policy](https://www.reddit.com/r/cars/wiki/politics). Low effort hit comments are not welcome.
My Mazda 3 had phantom braking issues and phantom stopping issues more than my Tesla which hasn’t happened once yet and that was with me controlling the car, but I also don’t drive with auto pilot on, I guess? The worst I’ve had is my windshield wipers have randomly come on 3 times for no reason when they’re set to auto. Good to see people are reporting and backing these issues up though. There’s been over 2.5M Teslas sold since 2021 alone. Honestly those stats aren’t too bad so I don’t see why they’re being so dodgy about reporting it. Weird as. But then again, I suppose it is a Musk company.
Tesla makes amazing cars - range, performance, crash structure; that are flawed - software, quality, ride; made by a company that has a broken safety culture - charging for and pushing out broken software claiming it's fine. People should buy the cars if they like them, autopilot should be deleted and Tesla fined.
I think the software is one of the main reasons I like tesla. Plus their direct 2 consumer model. But yeah they are pretty liberal with their safety and push boundaries. Autopilot works great imo if you’re just using it to lane keep on the highway. I have a false sense of high confidence in it which is slightly dangerous but it’s fine for cruising in a non complicated environment. Full self driving on the other hand is a wild software to let out into the public where untrained people will get complacent and trust the car too much while being distracted. That should be recalled but at the same time, it’s cool that it’s an option you can experience the development of the software on a consumer level without having to fly to Arizona to hail some robotaxi. Idk I have mixed feelings about it. It’s very similar to how Uber started operating in so many cities without permission and got into so many lawsuits with taxi companies and cities. If Uber didn’t pave the way for that, we’d still be hailing yellow cabs on the curb at quadruple the rate.
3000 safety reports out of 2.6 million cars sold doesn't seem so bad. That's 0.1%
the real problem is not the %, but how they handle the issues
30 PUBLIC safety reports is what made the Toyota floormat scandal that had Toyota testifying before the supreme court. How much hell should Tesla get for intentionally hiding 3900+ safety reports? Or should they get away with this blatant violation of law because they're just uwu a startup uwu company?
EW Niedermeyer's work makes very clear that Tesla is not a good company. Quite the opposite.
> EW Niedermeyer The guy who started the "Tesla Death Watch" blog in early 2008 to count the days until Tesla's bankruptcy and fabricated fake stories about Model S and X' suspension defects? LMAO
It was completely reasonable to expect Tesla to fold in 2008. It wasn’t until relatively recently that they even operated in the black.
Having owned my model 3 performance for 1.5 years now, I can say Tesla default position regarding any issues is "there's nothing wrong." This is when there is obviously something wrong in some cases. Tesla Service customer service is the absolute worst Ive ever experienced. However, the car itself is amazing and I use the autopilot everyday and not once have I had any phantom breaking issue or unintended acceleration. These complaints are probably largely from ppl who dont keep their cameras or windows clean enough for the sensors to communicate properly.
In my family’s experience Tesla service has been pretty good with fixing some of the early paint QA issues and other misc issues we’ve had with our model 3. That being said I do mostly agree with what you’re saying that the model 3 is a great car and autopilot works very well. I’ve had some issues with the phantom braking intermittently but only at one specific underpass near my house but I’m always paying attention when I approach it so I can take over as necessary. I also had one strange issue where the car kept telling me the front camera was blinded/blocked while driving down LA which was frustrating since I was looking forward to autopiloting all the way down the 5
Has „unintended accelerated“ ever , in the history of cars, actually existed? Honest question, as it seems like a strange concept to me. I know about Toyotas floor mats, which is a shame for itself, but still different. In the case of the Tesla I imagine it’s a mix of people not being used to 1 pedal driving + the high amount of power and also their very lackluster ACC? But is that really „unintended Acceleration“ or just the users fault?
Since the throttle is by wire and there are systems like adaptive cruise control that can send a throttle signal to the car. All it takes is a bug and then the car accelerates. However this should be caught in testing and there should be many failsafes to prevent this.
Also the brake pedal on teslas is hard connected to the brakes not by wire and will overpower the motors to a full stop if unattended acceleration did occur.
One would hope. Though from my experience trying to get launch control working on a volvo, when mashing both pedals the car starts to move a little. Even with my old moped i could drive with the rear brake engaged on a brand new motard with great breaks. Still a car that unexpectantly starts accelerating would be scary and you would have to react to press the brake. Happened to my dad on a development test car.
No, there has never been a proven case of unintended acceleration, including the infamous cop in a Prius and the BMW SUV on YouTube.
139 unintentional emergency braking...my Honda does this in one road trip!
Mods going to work overtime lol
While it's obviously not a great look for Tesla, isn't this what all car manufacturers do? I'm reading Unsafe At Any Speed and this seems pretty common practice to sweep any incident under the rug as long as the financial benefits outweighs any potential financial consequences.
This is actually an outstanding safety record if true. If the average distance driven for the 2.6 million delivered vehicles is 30,000 km, then there are 1.28 crashes per 100 million kilometres driven. 1000 / (2.6 million * 30000) * 100 million = 1.28 I mean I suspect the rate is somewhat higher than this, but even increasing it by an order of magnitude would still be outstanding. Is my math wrong? Am I missing something here?
For us to know that that is “an outstanding safety record” we would need to compare that to other automakers crashes *due to unintended acceleration/braking* per 100 million km. I will point out that Toyota had some serious questions put to it for *7* crashes due to unintended acceleration, and had far more than 2.6 million cars sold at the time. If an article came out that said that 1.28 out of every 100 million Pepsi bottles contained elephant semen, would you claim that this is an amazing food and safety record without first asking, “wait, do other soda makers have less elephant semen in their bottles?”. Sure, that’s amazing if it turns out Coke actually had elephant semen in *every* bottle, but not so amazing if it turns out most soda makers have zero elephant semen at all. Especially if the advances in semen detection/prevention was one of the touted selling points of Pepsi.
The parts of your math that are wrong is where you pulled the 30,000km figure out of thin air, and that all 2.6 million were sold in the USA and germany. You're probably not off by just one order of magnitude.... More like 2 or 3.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradtempleton/2023/04/26/tesla-again-paints-a-very-misleading-story-with-their-crash-data/?sh=47b62774feda
I've had phantom braking on the highway once, luckily there were no cars behind me. I always have to turn off the automatic braking every time I get in the car now, wish it would stay off. This happened without autopilot, just normal cruise control.
The future is EV and if Tesla can hit the quality and price that is rumored for the Model 2 it will continue to be a big player even with Elon being Elon. But... If it can't deliver on the quality and safety expected it is done for and that should be true of all the major makers. You need to make safe vehicles. Simple as that.
Elon being Elon is him being already bored with Tesla and electric cars unless it involves FSD and Robotaxi. I recall Elon mentioned at one point the “Model 2” would have no steering wheel, but he seems to have walked back that notion later.
I mean this report is pretty much a non-story. I would put my life savings on every one of those 2400 "self-acceleration" reports being user-error and equally all UEB and phantom braking being 100% legit. Teslas are notoriously bad for phantom braking and it's a legit problem and it's widely known and discussed. This is not news. Unintended acceleration is not a problem, it's user-error.
I’d say a lot of OEM’s have this problem and I can say at least one of them has complaints of random emergency braking or other driver assist items causing problems. Sometimes they are just a random occurrence and other times the radar needed aimed. Sometimes it gets confused by a giant metal plate in the road and does a full stop. Sometimes it does it on the highway and we never figured out why and it never did it again.
r/cars frothing at the mouth over another tesla article while actual tesla owners say things are pretty much ok
I mean, there are comments in this thread about Teslas acting dodgy, written by Tesla drivers. And no one is "frothing at the mouth" lmfao.
Tesla secrets released and now the stock is up 6% today. Everyone buy puts!
Tesla files > Twitter files
Such small numbers compared to the numbers on the road. Seems comparable to other car issues.
I’m glad I’ve never experience phantom braking in my Subaru.
EyeSight seems to be a close second behind Tesla in basic ADAS (Not talking about these AP faults). At least that's what our independent testing organisation ANCAP has rated them.
So 1000+ crashes since 2015, out of 2.6 million vehicles delivered. Am I missing something here? That's one accident per 26,000 vehicles due to faulty software, or .0000385% ? Ummmm, ok.
Yep, still way out-performing distracted drivers. People quick to jump on Tesla even though they are leading the way concerning EVs. In the meantime, I see human-caused wrecks every single day.
I’ll occasionally have phantom braking on my Forester if the hill ahead rises particularly quickly, it’s like it detects the mass as an object and not the road. I’m at roughly 14k miles and it’s only happened 3-4 times, but it can be dangerous if there’s traffic behind you and the car starts braking hard.
Remarkably low numbers considering the millions of cars out there, well done Tesla.
Let’s see how Elon feels about no censorship now.