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Comment by dmbche | Hacker News Reader

Would you have a link to that? I'd be interested to look.

As a side note, I've never heard of confusing the pedals as an issue for ANY car, so if Telsa's get people to confuse them enough to bring them to court, it's probably bad design.

Edit: The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimates 16,000 accidents per year in the United States occur when drivers intend to apply the brake but mistakenly apply the accelerator.[3] from wikipedia on Sudden unintended acceleration

Hard to imagine how you fail to design pedals!

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> As a side note, I've never heard of confusing the pedals as an issue for ANY car

Then you haven't been paying attention around the Toyota acceleration scandal.

Pedal confusion is remarkably common when you buy a new car/use a rental (your feet rely on muscle memory), and it's not uncommon in the elderly.

Most of the Toyota unintended acceleration fits the statistical profile of pedal confusion in the elderly.

However, what Toyota really got whacked for is that when people pulled their software for audit, the software was a disaster and didn't even adhere to basic standards. At that point, it was cheaper for Toyota to just admit fault than go through with a whole lot of court cases that they were likely to lose once a jury got involved.

Oh wow! Thanks for the heads up.

When skimming about Toyota, I'm getting unsafe floor mats and sticky pedals as the cause of acceleration, but maybe I'm not looking hard enough. The other commenter also brought up that it's a common issue.

Guess I'm feeling less safe on the road then ever - and I'll get a manual to boot

I've definitely had a few instances (over a few decades of driving) when I lost confidence in my knowledge of which pedal was which. Rote knowledge is tricky that way. Fortunately, I was always able to safely test. I was never confidently incorrect, but I can see it from here. It's a scary thought.

Another one crash that I think about semi often was a bus crash in Queens that killed 3 people where the bus was doing 60 in a 30 and blew a red light. The cause was suspected to be a thermos wedged under the brake pedal and pushing on the gas. It seems like a dumb thing to think about sometimes, but I try to be aware of that risk. https://www.core77.com/posts/84534/How-a-Commuter-Thermos-Ma... https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/queens/ny-metro-dropped...

If memory serves the main ECU control loop didn't check for stack overflows so excessive recursion could smash the global variables on the stack and accidentally turn off any number of ECU tasks - including the one responsible for monitoring the accelerator and brake.

The ECU module includes watchdog support that runs on another chip or core (can't recall) that was intended to do backup monitoring of the main ECU - and especially it should have watched the brake pedal and of the brake was held for a minimum time it would override the ECU and force the accelerator to zero. However that function did not work reliably, making the watchdog useless.

The code itself was poorly structured, with lots of critical things done in one big "god" task that if accidentally disabled by a single bool flip in RAM would ultimately disable many safety critical functions. Normally you'd have multiple copies of such data structures that must agree, split the code up into separate isolated tasks so a failure of one doesn't stop the others, and implement basic stack overflow protection which again IIRC was available on the toolchain they were using but was not enabled.

The watchdog problems are especially inexcusable for a safety critical system.

Friend of mine works for a different well known car maker and tells me the software is exactly like that.

How many people will have to die before governments impose the software to be submitted for approval?

It was famously a problem for Audi in the 1980’s and almost destroyed the brand. I thought everyone had heard of that.

But it is one of the most common if not the most common cause of unintended acceleration in any car.

I’ve even had it happen to me one time. The typical scenario is that you’re traveling at low (“creep”) speed with your foot on (but not pressing) the gas pedal. You think your foot is on the brake, so you push to slow down… whoops you’re starting to accelerate.

The probable reason that it happens more often with Teslas is that they have less lag between pressing the accelerator and getting juice. So by the time you realize you messed up, you’re already going fast.

In most gas cars, firmly pressing the accelerator results in milquetoast acceleration and a lot of noise for a second while the transmission downshifts and the engine revs up. In an EV, you just… go.

This is why I brake with my left foot and go with my right. Cuts the latency and confusion to a fraction.

> As a side note, I've never heard of confusing the pedals as an issue for ANY car, so if Telsa's get people to confuse them enough to bring them to court, it's probably bad design.

I think this is media bias. The media picks up accidents involving Teslas far more often than they do other manufacturers. The national news will even cover Tesla recalls when it's just an over-the-air software patch with zero known real-world impact), and similarly despite that there are ~25K vehicle fires per year, you only see them in the media when a Tesla is involved. In particular, confusing pedals is pretty common, particularly among very old drivers.

>confusing the pedals as an issue for ANY car,

I remember NASA thought so. So I just posted it, thanks for the post idea!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36077149

It happens all the time. People panic and mash their foot to the floor. Some old guy crashed into 6 cars down the street from my work through a parking lot, and jumped his car across the alley and though the wall of my office into our break room. He just panicked and thought he was mashing the brakes. Luckily nobody was in the break room.

I think it's more that if someone does it in a Tesla, it makes for good headlines and generates clicks, so we hear about it. Someone in my hometown confused the pedals in an ICE car a few years ago, made a small blurb in our tiny newspaper, nowhere else. Same with cars catching on fire. Happens all the time, but when it happens to a Tesla, you see it in the national news.

I googled driver confuses pedals and got a ton of results. Surprisingly it happens pretty often. Makes me a little nervous.

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