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Comment by ajross | Hacker News Reader

Meh. Like everything else with Tesla this is mostly an exercise in Who Can Best Express the Situation as a Confirmation of Priors.

In the real world, stuck accelerators are a common (but very dangerous) failure mode in all vehicles (just google "stuck accelerator"), and this isn't even the first vehicle to be dinged with such a problem at the design level. Which of those principles did Toyota violate when they had an almost identical issue in 2009?

Not to say this isn't bad, or shouldn't be fixed, or that there won't be a legitimate root cause analysis produced that tells us something interesting. But what you wrote seems poorly grounded.

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> Who Can Best Express the Situation as a Confirmation of Priors.

That's what happens when your CEO spends a lot of time publicly engaged in culture war politics.

Yes, it happens, but lots of stupid things happen all the time. It's still for us to let other people's stupidity cloud our judgement. Even if one of those stupid people is the CEO of the company involved...

You're not wrong, but it's rare that people believe their judgement is clouded, in fact, they likely feel their judgement is highly informed by what they view as stupidity or genius.

> In the real world, stuck accelerators are a common

In my car from the mid 90s' the solution to a stuck accelerator is pretty trivial.

You can physically shift the transmission, which is a mechanical connection, into neutral. Worst case you can turn the key which electrically disconnects the ignition. And stuck accelerators were rarely a problem because the throttle was a physical cable.

pretty trivial

It doesn't matter how trivial it is to override a stuck pedal, it's still a serious hazard, because even if you have the option to shift into neutral a driver may not think of that or may not react in time.

It's also trivial to override it in the Cybertruck: just press the brake pedal. Braking is hard-coded to cut off the accelerator, so if both pedals are pressed the brake wins and the accelerator is ignored. Still a big problem though.

I had this exact situation happen a number of years ago when I was driving our '97 Ford Taurus (it had undergone a number of repairs at that point, including an engine overhaul, so it probably wasn't due to an OEM defect). My first reaction was to stomp on the brakes, but it was immediately clear that the engine was winning that battle; so, I quickly shifted into neutral and pulled into the turning lane. My wife was in the car with me and remarked that she didn't think she would have known what to do, especially to react that quickly.

Our current vehicles are a manual transmission Civic and a PHEV Pacifica. The Civic is easy—just press in the clutch—but the Pacifica would be more tricky; I guess I'd start with the brakes, then the shifter (which is just an input to the computer, of course), then hold down the power button, and then look for a place to ditch.

> then hold down the power button

on APCI computers, the power button is software-controlled, i.e. it sends a signal to the OS, if the OS is currently frozen (or is configured to ignore it), pressing the power button does nothing. But to override this, if you hold it for about four seconds, a hardware shutdown still happens (is it done by the motherboard?). There are also other functions, like holding the power button for 30 seconds to enter into recovery mode on iPhones.

I wonder if holding the power button on a running EV car does anything similar...

There is no power button, but you can probably shift into neutral

Uh, the problem with stuck accelerators isn't that you can't get the car to slow down. I'm sure that's possible in the Tesla too.

The problem is that by the time you've reacted to the sudden unexpected acceleration and found a way to get the vehicle to stop, you may have already crashed or run something over or something. This is true on your car with a physical transmission as well.

This is all assuming that the brake overrides the accelerator (which it really really should, especially on an electric car where it's all computerized).

Unfortunately, this is true. By the time the average person debugs why the car is rushing full speed ahead, it's too late. Hopefully the brakes are strong enough to stop the engine torque, though.

> This is true on your car with a physical transmission as well.

I think you mean an automatic physical transmission. My manual transmission car has a clutch that I can always disengage in a fraction of a second.

I meant what I said. The entire point of my comment is that it's the human reaction time that's gonna be the limiting factor.

Apologies, although in this case you are wrong. Human reaction time to disengage the engine in a 3-pedal car is split-second.

As someone who was a passenger in a vehicle that had a stuck accelerator, going at highway speed, approaching a busy intersection, I suggest that you are dramatically trivializing the problem.

We probably had a couple of seconds before multiple people were gonna be dead-dead.

People don’t always think, or act, in the most sensible way in an emergency. In this case, the driver overshot neutral and threw the vehicle into reverse. We spun out and needed up in the ditch.

> In this case, the driver overshot neutral and threw the vehicle into reverse.

FWIW my 3-pedal daily driver is impervious to this failure mode. If the engine starts doing anything I don't expect my instinctive reaction is to push in the clutch pedal, which I am always prepared to do in a split second because I keep my left foot resting lightly on it. In the extremely unlikely situation where the clutch pedal also doesn't work I can still yank the shifter into neutral. The only way to get to get it into reverse is to pull up on a collar on the shaft of the stick and then shift into the "first gear" position, which I'm definitely not going to do while panicking.

It isn’t ever trivial for two simple reasons:

- it’s not something that happens regularly so drivers are not prepared for it

- it can cause disaster in literal seconds (or even a single second)

It doesn’t matter how easy it is to mitigate if there is going to be a delay in most drivers deploying that mitigation.

Driving a death trap shitbox isn’t a flex you think it is

> almost identical issue in 2009?

Or Audi in 1984?

>Which of those principles did Toyota violate when they had an almost identical issue in 2009?

None.

https://www.motortrend.com/news/toyota-found-not-at-fault-in...

The conspiracy theorist in me says this came at a time when the US auto market wasn't great and it was amplified to get people to buy American cars.

That was one case that didn't find evidence for fault. The ability to stick a Toyota accelerator with the floor mats due to design issues was very well documented, all over youtube, and the recall was very real.

In fact the evidence looks just like this situation with the Cybertruck. So getting back to the confirmation of priors point: it's telling that you view one as a "conspiracy" and the other as The Truth.

I may not be part of the collective here, but I find it within the realm of acceptable that a $30,000 car would have issues that should absolutely not be present on a $100,000 car.

I don't see Porsche's, Hellcat's, and BMW's having issues with something that has been a resolved non-issue for decades at this point.

BMW has recently had a lot of issues over years with some PCV valve setups.

Looks like they've recalled almost 1 million vehicles and have tried multiple times to address the issue.

https://bimmers.com/blog/pcv-valve-heater-recall-explained/

I don't know enough if that meets your requirement of "something that has been a resolved non-issue for decades at this point" but it's something that BMW has apparently been trying and failing to fix for awhile now.

A valve for emissions is a fuck up, but not kind of fuck that that's the poorly made fake metal accelerator covers in a $100,000+ car can fall off and unintentionally accelerate the vehicle (which can go 0-60 in 3.9s) to a top speed on 112MPH, that's also made out of stainless steel that will destroy anything it hits, including you.

I have higher expectations for my poorly made death machines.

I think there's a floor for what should be acceptable at any price point. Rapid and unintended acceleration is below said floor.

You're demonstrating the problem with speaking overly generally.

I too "find it within the realm of acceptable that a $30,000 car would have issues that should absolutely not be present on a $100,000 car". If, say, a plastic piece on the dashboard tends to develop an unsightly crack over time, that's more ok for a $30k car than for a $100k car.

But some design issues should be present on no car; not a $30k car, not a $100k car, not a $5k car. "The car sometimes accelerates on its own" is one of these.

You're absolutely right, it is unacceptable for any car to unintentionally accelerate. But one of these issues being "our cheap floor mats move" when compared to "our $100,000 truck's fake pedal covers are made so cheaply that they break" showcases this disparity a helluva lot more.

It's certainly more embarrassing for the $100k car than for the $30k car, but neither is "within the realm of acceptable".

True, I misspoke regarding "within the realm of acceptable". That's on me

I have a hellcat redeye, approximately one of your $100k cars. I've thoroughly enjoyed the car in the nearly 2 years I've owned it. But, I'm barely over 6,000 miles, and I've killed 2 batteries and just had the starter replaced and a loose ground (fixed/replaced under warranty). The loose ground may not have been a factory defect: I had to have the wiring harness replaced after some rodents chewed through some of the wiring...

Dodge probably also isn't a paragon of quality.

And I will preface this by saying that Audi isn't without fault either, but my also $100Kish RS 5 has in two years had two issues: a battery failure (determined to be a battery fault, not a vehicle fault), and improper drainage in one of the doors, leading to an accumulation of water, that had a tech advisory to add an additional drainage hole.

You should look up more on this time.

The floor mats were blamed, but in at least a couple of these cases, it was found that the occupant claimed to have hit the brakes, but actually hit the accelerator.

There is also a staggering number of “two foot drivers” out there.

Incidentally, my sunfire also had the issue of the pedal getting stuck on the floor mat, and more than once I had to press in the clutch cause the pedal got stuck.

The focus on toyota those years always stood out as a hit job to me (and that was a time when I generally disliked Japanese cars cause I was young and impressionable).

Again, though, the evidence that you could get a Toyota accelerator to stick was clear and obvious and available via copious video on the internet. That part wasn't made up.

You're saying that it may not have been the cause of an accident. Which may be true, but (1) isn't evidence that there wasn't a clear design flaw and (2) is also true of the Cybertruck, which hasn't had any reported mishaps at all.

Yet to you the Toyota thing was a "hit job" where this isn't? It's 100% symmetric, so why the difference in interpretation? I mean, we know why. But "because Elon" makes for poor logic.

After watching the video, it looks like a very serious design or QC issue, for a company widely known for QC issues.

The mats were a hit job because most of the cases were not actually the mats, and one company was getting a hard focus for this issue when it was prevalent in many different brands.

The cybertruck is not a hit job because this is just another in the laughing stock line of quality control and design issues from a company known for it.

why does the truck not just use the same accelerator as the (proven) car?

Agile car. The accelerator was made in a different sprint.

> Like everything else with Tesla this is mostly an exercise in Who Can Best Express the Situation as a Confirmation of Priors.

Man that's so true, and something incredibly frustrating about the discourse around Tesla (and Elon Musk more generally). The discussion is dominated by people who either worship the ground Elon walks on, or who think he's a cartoon villain. Neither is true, of course. But most of the time, those are the framings which dominate. I really hate it.

I think most rational people see him as a grown up bratty rich kid. Except now he has the power to control the outcome of wars. So now cartoon villain isn’t too far off.

He's just a dude. He does some smart things, he does some stupid things. He's nowhere near a cartoon villain.

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