Tesla recalls all cybertrucks for faulty accelerator pedals | Hacker News Reader

Tesla recalls all cybertrucks for faulty accelerator pedals

techcrunch.com

451 pointssarimkx593 comments

> . After performing a series of tests, it decided on April 12 to issue a recall after determining that an “[a]n unapproved change introduced lubricant (soap) to aid in the component assembly of the pad onto the accelerator pedal,” and that “[r]esidual lubricant reduced the retention of the pad to the pedal.”

How do you have so little quality control and insight into your manufacturing process that someone on your own production line can introduce a new step to your truck manufacturing process that no one noticed?

I guess when analysts said the incumbent auto manufacturers would have a large advantage over Tesla in manufacturing, this is what they meant?

Because this looks like a very unprofessional error to have made for a company that has done well up until now.

>How do you have so little quality control and insight into your manufacturing process that someone on your own production line can introduce a new step to your truck manufacturing process that no one noticed?

That's legal covering the company.

I'd bet this was just a general design flaw.

To me both sound plausible (that the process was added, and that it’s a fabricated story). Either way we will never know, and ultimately it’s Tesla’s responsibility to make sure the accelerator pedal doesn’t get suck in the on position due to manufacturing defects.

We’ll find out in discovery if a lawsuit around this ever happens, I suppose

> That's legal covering the company.

Er, how does it cover the company? Company is responsible regardless.

What does unapproved mean in this context? That it didn't pass by Musk's desk?

I am generally mildly negative on many Tesla decisions, but this has happened to the big manufacturers as well. Stock floor mats that caused stuck accelerator. Toyotas infamous stuck accelerator code that actually hurt people. Their code was reputedly a giant mess.

If Telsa and the article are telling the truth then these aren't anywhere near the same.

The mat was a design flaw from the beginning that missed QA, that happens in any large scale manufacturing as you can't just get everything right from the start.

If the article is telling the truth, this was a change made on the build line that wasnt' approved, that's a huge f$ck up if true and an incredible show of incompetence if someone can just start making design changes without approval on the build line.

It’s better that a mat was designed in a dangerous way vs a production line mistake? That is similar to saying a simple bug is worse than an architectural flaw that no one caught at design time. Far more eyes are on the design flaw vs a production bug.

>vs a production line mistake?

I think the point they are getting at, if I understand the commenter correctly (and assuming the wording of the article is accurate), is that someone on the line had the ability to make a change to the production process without authorization.

That would not just be a "production line mistake", instead it is indicative of a serious policy and procedure failure. No single person on the production line should have the ability to make unauthorized changes to the procedures being used in production.

I hate analogies, but to use yours, it is a rogue employee that was able to change critical code with no approval process -- and no one else noticed that code was being changed and went ahead with shipping it out.

This is basically how all construction and manufacturing jobs work out, though? It isn't an isolated "single person" that can make arbitrary changes. They can propose something and it should be reviewed.

So, I don't think it is quite as simple as an isolated bug, per se. But it is very common for changes to get introduced at build time of physical things. Depending on where and what the change is, the level of review for it will be very different.

>This is basically how all construction and manufacturing jobs work out, though?

Not really. Any place with a decent QA department would sample a part, compare it to the specification, and raise an alarm because the part differs from the specification. There also should be occasional audits on the build process itself, which should have identified this, as it would differ from the specified process.

This type of issue (again, assuming the articles wording is true -- I have no idea) can only occur if there is either bad/missing QA, or bad/missing specifications.

>But it is very common for changes to get introduced at build time of physical things

Even in construction you need to have changes approved (i.e. a "change order" approved by the architect, engineer, and owner). Even extremely minor changes (which this would not be) must be documented on the "as-built" drawings.

> Even in construction you need to have changes approved (i.e. a "change order" approved by the architect, engineer, and owner). Even extremely minor changes (which this would not be) must be documented on the "as-built" drawings.

Do you really think this is what happens on job sites? Does this match your personal experience? Because my initial reaction was to laugh to myself at how rarely contractors, subcontractors, and crewmembers would actually engage a process like the one you are describing here. Non-spec stuff happens all the time without record, even in firms with solid QA.

>Do you really think this is what happens on job sites? Does this match your personal experience?

I worked in ICI (Industrial, Commercial, Institutional) construction for ~10 years. Yes, this matches my experience. Perhaps it is different where you are from.

I also experienced this while doing utility locating for oil & gas pipelines (~2 years). As-built drawings were very accurate, and detailed any deviation from the initial drawings.

In the 2000s I had a SaaS firm making software for underground utility locating companies so I learned a lot about the industry. In most parts of the country as built drawings are unusual for residential property anyway. Locating staff mostly shows up, looks at whatever drawings are available, and then has to figure out what was actually done from the clues and by using locating equipment. Many of these folks end up with a very subtle understanding of what common practice was by different utility companies in various specific areas in specific eras.

>In most parts of the country as built drawings are unusual for residential property anyway.

I was doing large transmission pipelines (i.e. NPS 24 to NPS 56), so I can't speak to residential, but I wouldn't be surprised if there was less attention paid to as-built drawings when the cost of damage/replacement wasn't in the millions of dollars.

I am involved with software that moves data between construction ERP systems and financial systems. Typically used in mid market commercial companies.

The single most commonly synced entity is Commitment Change Order items.

> Do you really think this is what happens on job sites? Does this match your personal experience?

Yes, it does. I’m a construction project manager, I’m not having my crew do any work that isn’t represented in the current revision of the plans and specs without approval because that’s the only way you get paid for the extras. Also if it’s an unapproved and unwanted change, you have to pay to remove it. Anyone managing a project who cares about managing their risk is going to submit RFIs and RFCs for every change.

It’s possible that the (tiny and insignificant) residential market is different, but that’s how commercial and industrial construction works.

It’s possible some tiny and insignificant changes like moving a receptacle or data opening a couple inches aren’t properly documented on the as-builts, but major changes almost always are.

> Because my initial reaction was to laugh to myself at how rarely contractors, subcontractors, and crewmembers would actually engage a process like the one you are describing here.

The firms you hire to work on your house aren’t representative of the firms who manage or work on commercial and industrial projects.

> It’s possible some tiny and insignificant changes like moving a receptacle or data opening a couple inches aren’t properly documented on the as-builts, but major changes almost always are.

Based on these responses I should have been more clear. These small and inconsequential things are what I'm referring to. Yes, the projects I'm familiar with track the medium and big stuff, and most of the small stuff.

I have seen multiple thousands of dollars of precast concrete get junked because an edge was less than half an inch out of tolerance. Multiple times. I have myself rejected multiple thousands of dollars of rebar because the hook length was short by less than an inch. Nothing that is shown in the plans or specs is inconsequential and payment doesn’t occur absent an approved variance.

All I’m saying is that out of spec work does happen. I’m not defending it.

and all I'm saying is that it doesn't make it on to the job in the first place usually and it certainly doesn't make it out to the public like with the cybertruck pedal

Absolutely! Why? Because it's your ass that's on the line should any of your "self-motivated" deviations cause financial harm, injury, or death, and you are going to be held responsible for those damages.

No one with any brains wants to be "that" guy.

That's why we have "cookie cutter" houses and even office buildings. All the kinks have been legitimately worked out and they can just crank them out. Bespoke construction? Cost overrun city. Now you know why.

This is going on the idea that there wasn't a documentation event with this change? I'm positing that knowing it is a recall on all of the trucks indicates that it was, in fact, a signed off change on the assembly line.

That is to say, just because it was on the assembly line doesn't mean it wasn't reviewed. And just because it was reviewed doesn't mean it wasn't a mistake. Part of the sign off was almost certainly "does not need retesting" for implementation. Which, was clearly a mistake. But isn't a sign of a broken QA system.

Relevant part of the quote which started this discussion:

>“[a]n unapproved change [...]

Unapproved, to me, implies that it was not reviewed or signed-off.

>Part of the sign off was almost certainly "does not need retesting" for implementation

If you are not assuring your quality, you have a QA failure. Regardless, I initially said "serious policy and procedure failure". Which, if you change a safety-critical component in your product and don't do testing on it, that is a serious policy failure.

Ah, totally fair. I took that to be "unapproved all the way back to the designer." Which, yeah, that doesn't happen. It almost certainly has approval from a line manager at the bare minimum, if it helps perform the assembly. If it goes to more teams than a single line, it gets more approval.

I think I largely biased to the next message, which did indicate reviews would happen, but that they have some freedom at the line. And that still sounds right to me.

This sounds like standard corporate ass covering to me. "Oh, that was just an unauthorised rogue employee, they've been fired" sounds a lot better than "someone suggested lubing up the accelerator to speed up production, and no one thought to check it won't cause problems".

For sure, I have no idea if the wording is truthful or just standard corporate blame dilution. But if the wording is truthful, this would be a significant process & policy failure.

If you ask me the lube just accelerated the problem. The root cause remains that you have a part secured with only a friction fit, in a setting where if that friction fit fails you have a a critical failure of the system. Friction fits can be very strong when properly established between appropriate materials, but this was not that. This was a cheap plastic cover made to be a bit too small over the metal lever. Over time with heat, sand/dirt, cold, pressure, vibration, etc. cycles, this was going to fall off regardless.

> It’s better that a mat was designed in a dangerous way vs a production line mistake? That is similar to saying a simple bug is worse than an architectural flaw that no one caught at design time. Far more eyes are on the design flaw vs a production bug.

:) I think you're missing my point, or I 've failed to explain it clearly.

A design flaw is bad, but we can't eliminate those. According to this article an assembly line employee went rouge and introduced a change without telling anyone.

If the article is correct then clearly these two things aren't even near comparable. We expect design flaws and adapt, we don't expect employees to go rouge and change the design without telling anyone.

Now the article or Tesla could be lying here but this is the facts as we know them.

Does that help clear things up for you?

I also dont' think you deserved the downvotes I saw you got for just misunderstanding. Sorry that happend to you!

I don't believe I misunderstand anything. This would be an interesting case study. It is very convenient to blame an employee "going rogue" for a dangerous issue like this. The design wasn't even changed. They just used a lubricant (soap?) to slide it on.

This overall points out the immaturity in Tesla's manufacturing process if changes like this can happen and then occur or affect every vehicle of a particular type produced, does it not? Overall, it still seems like a "below the line" change. These can still be quite impactful (see: memory corruption bugs leading to compromise and functional exploits). But it is still more akin to a bug or production flaw than a design flaw.

A design error leaves a papertrail for future study and redress.

An unapproved/undocumented production change may leave only the misproduced items. Mistakes happen, but this sounds more like changing the process without review.

wrt to the code: Although NASA found many aesthetic issues with the Toyota code, it did not find a smoking gun. [1] Presumably many other of their other products are running successfully with similar code. To put the comparison bt Toyota and Tesla in perspective: Toyota is an 85 year old company which ships about 10 million vehicles per year. Tesla has shipped almost 5 million vehicles total as of July 2023.[2]

[1] "In conducting their report, NASA engineers evaluated the electronic circuitry in Toyota vehicles and analyzed more than 280,000 lines of software code for any potential flaws that could initiate an unintended acceleration incident. "

"NASA engineers found no electronic flaws in Toyota vehicles capable of producing the large throttle openings required to create dangerous high-speed unintended acceleration incidents."

"The two mechanical safety defects identified by NHTSA more than a year ago – “sticking” accelerator pedals and a design flaw that enabled accelerator pedals to become trapped by floor mats – remain the only known causes for these kinds of unsafe unintended acceleration incidents."

https://www.transportation.gov/briefing-room/us-department-t...

[2] https://www.licarco.com/news/how-many-tesla-cars-have-been-s...

That Toyota code was a total mess and NASA missed a few things. Take a look at this report from a CMU prof.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31236303

Correct, but, to bring it back to the original point, there's a difference between "sloppy code" and "sloppy code that cascades into unintended acceleration". The fact that it didn't actually cascade isn't a reason to keep writing sloppy code, of course. But such sloppiness also remains a red herring until they can actually find a concrete way that code could have contributed.

Last I heard there was speculation that the CPU was vulnerable to an alpha particle flipped bit error and fixing that was the eventual patch. A one in a million shot happens ten times a year (sic) when you ship ten million cars a year covering many billions of miles.

An analysis by expert witnesses in the trial found that a small amount of memory corruption could trigger task death and unintended acceleration. The report did not find the cause of the memory corruption, but many software errors can corrupt memory. https://www.safetyresearch.net/Library/BarrSlides_FINAL_SCRU...

Or the Takata airbag scandal [1]. A decade worth of airbags that were compromised, over 100 million vehicles that had to have all airbags replaced, likely 100+ injured and dozens of deaths. The sheer scale of that is absolutely mind-blowing, there is virtually no car manufacturer (except Tesla, ironically - I think they manufacture in-house?) that did not get hit.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Takata_Corporation#Defective_a...

It just means Tesla bought air bags from the other manufacturers for airbags. Takata just happened to be the biggest supplier. My old v6 Honda was unaffected by airbag recalls because they used airbags from Autoliv. There is also Daicel and Nippon Kayaku and ZF.

That's what I thought until I saw the video. The top metal panel that covers the accelerator literally falls off, wedging itself between the accelerator and the car. It's not a fabric cover.

My Corolla was also recalled - code was a mess as with most embedded projects but no obvious bugs related to unintended acceleration - think the cases reported were less than a 300.

Never encountered the issue.

They replaced my floor mats and installed a new pedal assembly and updated to the ECU with "brake override" ability - meaning if I pressed the brake pedal it would ignore input from the throttle.

Yea many things point to it having been mass hysteria and people too stupid to shift their cars in neutral if the throttle really did fail.

Except this has nothing to do with those things.

This is just the f'n rubber pad on the accelerator can come off which isn't great, but harms nothing.

What is wrong with the people here?

That's just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to those vehicles.

You can void your warranty by driving them through car washes. What exactly is the point of a bulletproof truck that can't get wet?

No, you can't void your warranty that way. That was hyperbole.

"Damage caused by car washes is not covered by the warranty." in the owners manual seems to contradict that statement.

The preceding sentence explained why. Car wash damage is surprisingly common. I've known people who have had side mirrors damaged (not Teslas) and seeing damage to rear wipers is common enough that I've seen the results of it.

This whole story was essentially made up by mischaracterizing some guy's tiktok. :facepalm

Except everyone I've spoken to has had car wash damage covered by their dealer, except Teslas.

That seems unbelievable to be honest. You mean if the car wash breaks a wiper the dealer just replaced it?

I had a hard time getting my dealer to replace what was clearly warranty work (engine issues) due to them pretending the factory warranty extension didn't apply.

And here you have dealers replacing things that are explicitly excluded? Weird.

The pad can get wedged under a sill in front of the pedal, making the car accelerate even when you release the pedal. This could kill people.

I imagine some of the schadenfreude comes from the Tesla bulls proudly proclaiming "and unlike the other OEMs, Tesla has never had a recall" for years, when it was just a matter of time.

tesla also has floor mat issues (that it has tried to cover up)

An ‘unapproved change’ getting in to the process seems way worse to me than just the [‘approved’] production process having an unforeseen flaw that’s being corrected now it’s been found.

> someone on your own production line can introduce a new step to your truck manufacturing process that no one noticed?

That's actually not unusual at all.

It's perfectly common for an engineer to order that a hole be made in a given location on a given part without specifying that coolant should be used, or the spindle speed of the drill, or how the part should be held in the machine, or that the hole should be deburred.

Manufacturing is skilled work.

Bespoke manufacturing and machining is where this kind of change would be introduced. Not in a flushed out design being produced on a line. It becomes an expensive mistake when these types of decisions are made this late in the process. Seems like they rushed the design in a number of places.

This exact same thing was seen a Boeing, which isn't a model of good manufacturing, but it is semi-commmonplace for the line to have unapproved fixes.

https://uk.news.yahoo.com/faa-found-staff-boeings-supplier-0...

If I may clarify: Unapproved here would typically mean engineering hasn't signed off. It does not mean engineering was asked and said "Hell no".

And additionally, using dish soap to lubricate parts for assembly is standard procedure elsewhere in many industries. It's sometimes even recommended in the standard manuals as part of a repair procedure (I've had refrigerator gaskets that call out using a bit of soap on them before installation).

A crucial difference being that there's no risk of your refrigerator gasket sending a 3 tonne metal box into a crowd of people if it comes loose, unlike the gas pedal on a truck.

Playing fast and loose with the processes surrounding something as important (and dangerous) as the gas pedal is recklessness of the highest order.

Work instructions are kind of like programming - at ‘runtime’ you’ll find out all the different ways the technicians can misinterpret them, or ‘fill in the blanks’ for things you overlooked.

And yet every other major auto manufacturer on the planet seems to avoid this problem, so clearly Tesla's missing something.

This is so far off the mark that it must be sarcasm.

The hate is so deep that people lose their minds when it comes to a minor Tesla issue and conveniently forget the HUGE list of problems and recalls from all manufacturers over the years.

In many cases they just don't know about them because they're not pushed so hard in the media and people don't upvote negative stories about other car manufacturers like they do with negative Tesla stories on HN and Reddit.

It's very affective, that's why the oil lobby pushes negative EV news so hard in the media, especially right wing media.

That's a gross mis categorization and wildly reductionist to boot. The issue is this: a cult of personality has developed around a loudmouth sociopath with a track record of making wildly arrogant statements (See: I know more about manufacturing than anyone else on the planet) that are not, and never have been, backed by observational data. When Tesla set out to make cars they intentionally adopted the move fast and break shit approach, tossing over a century of industry knowledge overboard in the process. Net result: grotesque body fitment issues that are reminiscent of automobiles built in the 1920s, constant dumb software issues, trivially avoidable production bottlenecks, and borderline malicious marketing around half-baked assisted driving features (this list is incomplete). Then there is the comprehensive travesty Tesla calls a cybertruck. This much stupidity wouldn't be tolerated from any other auto manufacturer.

I'm prepared to change my stance on the matter the moment someone produces evidence that suggests other manufacturers have had instances of on-the-fly changes made on their production lines.

You honestly think other manufacturers have NOT had instances of on-the-fly changes made on their production lines. Ever? Really? You need 'evidence' to believe that manufacturing lines don't work perfectly, and technicians never make assumptions because the instructions are not always perfect.

You know nothing about manufacturing. People with experience try to correct you and you still think you know 'something' when you don't have a clue. Just accept you're wrong sometimes and move on.

"every other major auto manufacturer on the planet seems to avoid this problem" - just the worst assumption. As if you know anything about other auto manufacture's problems. Recalls aren't new. You are new and naive, and over confident in your ignorance.

Until evidence is supplied otherwise, no I don't. Incidentally I've worked in several manufacturing environments ranging from boutique hand-built to global scale mass production lines. Any outfit that has their shit together already has fitment and assembly issues thoroughly debugged before a process gets to production. You probably don't want to make assumptions about what I don't know. So what are you shilling anyway?

I work in manufacturing and sometimes stuff like this happens despite controls in place. You can get technicians/assemblers who just take it upon themselves to fix a problem rather than notifying anyone. To them it is no big deal (i.e. doesn't warrant mentioning to engineering), so it must be "no big deal".

Pressure to perform?

I would suspect more "get'r'dun".

At least in the instances I have encountered, it came from a place of well meaning combined with overconfidence.

Is "Irresponsibility" I feel -- without any true blame / shame though.

Complex work is hard.

Self-management is a big, under-appreciated part of that.

So Irresponsibility maybe not on the individual Worker's shoulders, but on all of us for under-appreciating the risky challenges of being a motivated worker in a complex job.

EDIT: here is the flaw

https://www.tiktok.com/@el.chepito1985/video/735775817650408...

yeah IDK if the Worker is to blame, seems like an obvious design flaw, e.g. they should not rely on 'soap' to keep a flat pedal cover attached to another flat pedal.

I actually blame the engineering/design department for this one.

The soap revealed the issue, but why aren't the peddles a single piece? Why do they have a sticker on them?

Even without the soap step, what happens if the cabin gets too hot or the factory has too much dust in it?

If you look at your car's peddles (and I'm including mine, a Tesla model 3) you'll notice they are basically a single piece mechanically fit together. Not some sticker glued for style.

Right, it's always dependant on circumstances. I try to stress as much as possible that you always need to design things in such a way that even the dumbest, newest assembler will still be able to build it correctly. And often times we review drawings/instructions and find lots of poorly outlined procedures.

But sometimes you get something like "The blue wire ran out, but I still had a bunch of light blue, so I just used that instead". It can be a killer.

No... I've been a maintenance worker. If you needed "Engineering" to help you fix every problem you faced everyday in a production line, the Engineer would need to come to work with you every day. If you stopped the production line until "someone higher up" came down to approve your changes, you'd better make sure you have a strong reason to do so as the company will be losing millions while you wait :).

You just solve problems all the time, every day, and it's really up to the technician to know when something requires notifying Engineering or not. Notify too much and they'll get rid of you for being annoying... notify too little and shit like this can happen, but in the very large majority of cases, it doesn't.

I haven't been a maintenance worker, but I've worked as an SWE in a company with a large IT dept. Sometimes it's faster to work around them to find solutions to doing your job. Both sides have good intentions but the IT dept. cannot move nimbly.

Same story everywhere.

I don't have a problem with technicians solving problems. But as an engineer I would like to codify the solution so that A) we're implementing a controlled process and B) if there's a better solution out there I can make that recommendation or fix the system. When you take it upon yourself then problems only happen if you don't communicate.

> If you stopped the production line until "someone higher up" came down to approve your changes, you'd better make sure you have a strong reason to do so as the company will be losing millions while you wait

Then what was the whole point of the Andon cable lesson that American manufacturers had to learn from Toyota?

Human nature. I run into this all the time. I've lost count of the number of times I've asked a user "Why did you not just mention this was not working right and you are working around it? We could have fixed this, but if you do not say anything it might be a while before someone on the dev team notices."

There's something difficult about notifying problems. You might make people angry, you might feel like a moron because you misunderstood, or guilty because you worry how they feel.

Agreed. For me it's often the time it takes to find the contact to notify, start a conversation, update the conversation, wait for the issue to be picked up, wait for the software to be updated. Now repeat for everything you notice.

If I did it for everything I encountered I wouldn't be doing my core work duty. It's more pragmatic the majority of the time to work around the issue and immediately get back to work.

Wait, don’t car assembly lines have a big red button you can push if you find a defect? Haven’t they for many years? Does pushing that button really make everyone angry?

That’s not how I had envisioned car manufacture at all.

You're right, in some settings there's everything in place to ease communicating issues. But what if it's not something clear enough to trigger it ?

I completely agree with you that some errors could be missed if no one noticed them. This seems entirely separate from the idea that people could become angry if the line were stopped, but of course you are right.

Yeah our support people at my company do the same thing. Then you'll get a report 6 months later that "[big critically important feature] is not working" and you'll look into it and support has adopted a process that essentially disables that feature or they have a workaround for a bug that was fixed 4 years ago and because they never entered the conversation at that time they still do the workaround.

We had a big kerfluffle around our OTA update system at one point because they did a big round of updates and "none of them worked." And then I dug into the system logs for each of those components and 95% of what they claimed didn't work actually did. But meanwhile you've got product managers and other people wading into the conversation to try to tell you to fix something that isn't actually the problem.

We're never truly going to get away from this until we stop excluding people from the conversation about product problems. I'm just sitting here hoping we adopt a quality management system of some sort before the company's product implodes.

There was a poorly implemented customer support system that I worked with once that due to the way the app worked, support could run a query that would essentially scan the entire database, predictably it'd hit a proxy timeout. So what happened instead was they would open 10+ tabs doing the exact same query hoping one would get lucky and succeed, and we had to figure out why our database was getting ddos'd. Trying to explain that they were actually making the issue worse with the workaround was very painful, saying stuff like "well what did you change, it was working fine for months."

Have you tried thinking of the reasons? I can think of several:

* There's probably a small chance it actually would get fixed, and therefore a decent probability that reporting it would be a waste of their time.

* They needed a solution sooner than reporting it and waiting for fix to maybe eventually appear. Once the workaround was in place there was no need for a fix.

* Sometimes the people running projects you use can be hostile, which makes reporting stuff very unappealing and even stressful. Much better to avoid interacting with them if at all possible.

* They didn't know who to report it to, or how to report it.

* They simply didn't have time to report it.

I think that devs often underestimate just how difficult it is for users to report problems. The most common problems are that the users feel ignored, like they're being a burden on the devs, or scolded (for not reporting it correctly, for "not holding it right", etc.). It's even common for there not to be an easy way to report such problems ("use Discord", "sign up for an account on this website and report there", etc.)

Even as a dev, I resist doing it because of how unpleasant it can be. If I can come up with a workaround without having to report the issue, that's what I'll tend to do. And if I have to talk to tech support rather than the devs? That's simply not going to happen unless I'm trapped into using the product.

We still haven't cracked this problem as an industry.

To make things worse the largest consumer tech companies, like Google and Apple, have a well deserved reputation for caring very little about customer feedback. It's a normal thing to lookup how to fix an annoyance or regression, finding hundreds of people posting about the same complaint, without ever getting any sort of response or reaction from the company.

Heck the only support Google offers for many products is a community forum that their own employees never post on, and I assume few even look at. People have largely been conditioned to think that tech companies don't care about their feedback.

Very true, but funny enough, AWS has some of the best support of any product I have ever used.

Why are users reporting issues directly to Dev?

This is a Support task, not a Dev task. Support should be working the tickets and reporting unsolvable issues with the code, so the Devs can address. You've been dealing with bad support teams, because your experience is not how support is supposed to work.

Also, we Ops folks truly appreciate undocumented work arounds by the Devs. We love spending hours pouring over a given system, trying 107 different versions of some framework, causing lots of downtime, and working nights/weekends, just to learn that some UNDOCUMENTED cludge fucking bullshit is what's actually causing the issue.

Do better man. You're shitting on more than just the users.

> Why are users reporting issues directly to Dev?

With open source, you're usually reporting to devs. With commercial software, usually to tech support or to nobody.

> You've been dealing with bad support teams, because your experience is not how support is supposed to work.

Yes, I know -- but it is how the majority of support actually is, if there is even support available at all. In a whole lot of cases, there is none.

I'm talking about software meant for consumer use. Software for business use is much better on these issues, although you still do find them. At my workplace, we recently took a large financial hit (and almost lost an important customer) because of bad and unresponsive tech support from a supplier. It happens.

Ironically you're just making the point of the post you're replying to.

and unironically, you have no idea what you're talking about.

> Why did you not just mention this was not working right and you are working around it?

Because in the real world messengers get shot.

An unapproved in-production change of a safety-critical article is "no big deal" to them? That bespeaks a Boeing-like safety culture.

It seems typical Elon Musk to me.

Tesla desperately wishes it could have the safety culture of Boeing.

I speculate in a Musk company, this "I will fix it" attitude would be promoted.

"I sleep on the floor" .. "You're fired for not proactively fixing a problem I just thought of a solution to". Is my speculation off-base?

There's an old story about toothpaste boxes and solving the empty box problem: https://www.reddit.com/r/engineering/comments/2o9dho/the_emp...

I've always suspected it was apocryphal. But just think, if the workers had installed that fan beforehand, we might be reading a story about how important workers are at solving little production problems.

Everyone thinks this mentality of having workers fix problems is great, until they use soap to put glued parts on.

It's a design error from the start. The workaround shouldn't have happened, but is only one of countless ways this would have inevitably happened anyway. Glue has a lot of failure modes. Correct application can't be reliably tested non-destructively. Product variances are often very hard to detect. Degradation with age and physical use can't be reliably forecast.

Three pins on the back of that appearance plate that push into starlock style fasteners in the pedal are cheaper than the appropriate glue, faster to install than glue, more reliable, trivially verified, impossible to misalign, and that's why it's a common solution that auto manufacturers use in this exact application. This was a confoundingly stupid place to rely on glue.

This is an underrated point. A lot of focus has been put on manufacturing procedures when this could've been avoided entirely in design.

IDK anything about manufacturing so I wonder if this was due to incompetence, to save costs, ignorance or something else?

Why not all of the above?

Correct - a great design is also easy / automatic to build correctly. This is vastly easier said than done when you have a complex product with many components.

I remember reading about the original iPhone's manufacturing operations in China - how the Apple engineers spent a ton of time making sure that the right way is also the easy way for the factory workers.

Same, I work in manufacturing(not automotive but heavy construction equipment) and see things like this all the time. Workers think they understand/ don't think engineers understand or want to do it faster/easier than what they were shown.

I have no knowledge of Tesla but here would be my guess:

Assembly worker found pad hard to put on pedal in sub-assembly area and used a spray bottle with soapy water on the pad to slip it on.

Story time: Called out to final assembly, machine starts and runs but not moving. Troubleshoot and find brakes not releasing. further troubleshoot and find it is due to pressure not getting to brakes(configuration is such that brakes come on if there is loss of hydraulic pressure). Replace hydraulic line, machine is working. Remove contaminate from line, no one know what it is. Assembly pointing fingers and saying sabotage. I walk around the assembly area, I find that paint decided to use packing peanuts to mask holes that the hydraulic fitting go in instead of masking tape as directed. The packing peanut tore while being removed and the assembly working inserting the fittings did not notice.

> Assembly worker found pad hard to put on pedal in sub-assembly area and used a spray bottle with soapy water on the pad to slip it on.

TBH, something like this might even get approved by a foreman. "Thanks for coming up with a clever way to save a few seconds on assembly!"

Definitely not the Total Quality Management model. If management and engineers can't be bothered, this shit happens.

It's easy to portray it as arrogance, but in manufacturing, you run into small problems and ambiguities all the time.

By analogy to software engineering, do your bosses or clients give you water-tight, formal specs for the software you need to build? If they could do that, they wouldn't be needing you in the first place.

We zero in on situations like that and pretend that it's the worker's fault for making the wrong call, but we ignore that if they didn't make the right calls a thousand times before, nothing would ever get done.

In this case, if pedal cover is a friction fit and can slide off and get jammed in between panels, this doesn't sound like an assembly mistake but a pretty major design error, right? Your designs should be resilient. What if the owner sprays WD-40 on a squeaky pedal and the cover slides off?

Exactly - especially in a TRUCK of all things. The pedal area should be expected to get getting all kinds of crud and crap in it and be cleaned regularly and be extra durable.

The fact that Musk publicly blames the fault on workers, shows that Tesla is already behind Toyota in philosophical thinking.

I don’t know anything about manufacturing, but the main thing that stood out when I toured the BMW plant in Munich was how ruthlessly efficient and regulated every step of the production process was. It’s hard to imagine there being any time for improvisation, or any ability for it to go unnoticed. Is Tesla’s production process just looser?

You have written this as if this doesn't routinely happen to every auto manufacturer. Why?

> You have written this as if this doesn't routinely happen to every auto manufacturer. Why?

Does it?

Which auto manufacturer's have had recalls due to unapproved changes made on the assembly line?

I've seen design flaws force a recall but i'm not certain that unapproved change s on the assembly line is something that routinely happens.

Do we have public post mortems for all the thousands of recalls over the years?

For example, what happened with Toyota's wheels falling off a couple a years ago.

I think Tesla has tons of problems, and I think the Cybertruck is a ghastly creation, and I think there have been many worse examples of QA problems at Tesla in the past (e.g. steering wheels falling off).

But at this point, this just feels like piling on. "OMG, how can their processes be so immature that something like this happened?!?!" Nearly all new models have significant recalls, and I'm not surprised for a vehicle as soup-to-nuts different as the Cybertruck. These are incredibly complicated engineering processes, so it's always easy to point out one thing (out of potentially millions) and yell "How could this happen?!"

I'm certainly not excusing Tesla for their overall QA issues, but at the same time this pearl clutching and what seems like undue attention every time there is a Tesla recall just seems over the top at this point.

> Because this looks like a very unprofessional error to have made for a company that has done well up until now.

I can't tell if this is a serious comment, because in the past there have been many weird problems, like wood trim in Model Ys:

https://www.thedrive.com/tech/36274/tesla-model-y-owners-fin...

(and yes, I know it's not exactly the same, but it's certainly still very bad to be using home renovation materials in the face of part shortages)

What's the problem with using trim? It doesn't seem like it'd have any impact at all, aside from being funny.

Would you be okay with your child driving a car where critical systems were assembled with whatever ad-hoc materials were available in local home renovation stores?

Given that I've never heard of an issue with that particular part after years of extended use...

Yes.

Are you willing to bet the safety of your family on the efficacy of some wood trim that someone bought at Home Depot to meet their manufacturing quota just because none of them have spectacularly failed yet? Really?

Given my knowledge of the part involved and the materials used, absolutely. I'd be doing it in the same way that I'm betting "the safety of [my] family on the efficacy" of the cheap little shim that I bought to make water bottles fit in the cup holders better.

Despite the high language involved here, there is no risk.

Although if you want to take up a career as a service advisor at a dealer, you might make good commissions from that style of rhetoric.

"Given the benefit of hindsight, I sure would!"

Gee good point.

How confident are you that you not hearing about such a failure means they haven't happened? How confident are you that this is the only component that's been hacked together like this?

Oh, there's plenty of cobbled together stuff. But we were talking about strain relief. That's boring compared to some of the dumb stuff that I've seen come out of that factory. :-)

My question was literally asking if/why this was unsafe.

> The trim appears to be providing some strain relief for the strap holding the LCC in place, perhaps to keep the tension from providing unnecessary stress on the condenser during vibration or flexing, or to prevent any sharp corners from severing the strap itself.

Can you explain to me why wood trim would be less safe than plastic for this?

Are the performance characteristics of that (presumably) random piece of wood well-established for a usecase like this?

If so: Sure, no problem!

If no: Then that's why.

A key part of engineering pretty much anything is understanding the characteristics of the materials. Plastics are extremely highly-engineered and well-understood (which is why they're everywhere now). Wood can be the same, but by default is not, especially in mass-production contexts where performance can vary dramatically between individual pieces of wood, which is one of many reasons you don't see it used in these contexts.

This could be totally fine, but there's absolutely no reason that should be the default assumption, especially when we know for a fact that was not the typical assembly plan and this is a company and culture known for cutting corners.

Trim has different heat tolerances than automotive-grade plastics, especially those physically attached to heat sources.

Also, the glue used in wood trim has a fairly low combustion temperature...

Whether or not you're comfortable with it, it shows that they bent their own manufacturing standards by using nonstandard parts that weren't purpose-built. When I buy a new Dell computer I don't expect to open it up to find parts taped together with electrical tape and wire nuts on connections. I similarly don't expect parts in my new Model Y to be made from materials that someone bought at Home Depot.

Or the Cybertruck's wheel covers coming off, or the lack of ridge next to the windshield that causes any moisture on the windshield to hit the side windows (and intrude if they're open), or the extremely failure prone Model S door handles, the cost optimizations that have lead to stalk-less steering columns, etc. You could write a book about all of the quirky little problems that Teslas have.

Incumbent manufacturers have most of this stuff figured out; Tesla seems to want to "be different" on the most minute and boring of things. They keep stubbing their toe along the way.

Don't forget saving a few dollars on a rain sensor... Tesla tried to use the cameras to detect rain in the early model S. The result was no automatic wipers for a long time.

The rest of the industry all use a standard sensor that works well.

Older model S cars have horrible intermittent wipers.

Turn them on, and invariably slow intermittent, becomes slow continuous, becomes annoying fast continuous. Really really just needed manual intermittent.

They're relearning the lessons of the auto industry they're trying to disrupt just like crypto is doing with banking, albeit slightly faster due to actual regulations to protect the public from the vaporware

When you consider who's running it, it makes perfect sense.

Only a moron of the scope of Musk would own an EV company, and then become a literal Nazi online alienating the left leaning people, you know, the kind of people interested in climate change, technology and EVs, and cater non-stop to right wingers, the kind of people who think climate change is a hoax, "EVs are for pussies", and love coal rolling.

I don't think it is an unprofessional error, there are many reasons that changes get introduced on the manufacturing line which benefit production speed and/or reduce errors.

What they missed was the after action surveillance and analysis. In a different organization such a change would go in, and at the same time kick off an engineering investigation to verify that it doesn't make anything worse. If that analysis comes up clean, there is no change. If it finds a problem though, then the change is reverted/changed to something else. In regular car companies you see things like "We're recalling all cars between VINxxxx and VINyyyy" which basically delineate that time between when the change was made and the time the analysis suggesting it wasn't a good thing. If its a minor thing there won't be a recall, just a bit of extra "warranty work" at the next service opportunity which the dealer does.

Moreover, from what I've seen, this is an isolated manufacturing escape. Given the perspective of the rapid growth in capacity, with 3 factories coming online in 5 years and 2 million+ total capacity, wouldn't we expect to see more escapes, even from a top performing auto company?

If rapid expansion is resulting in an increase in defects, whatever the cause, then the expansion itself is far too rapid and needs to be considered a fault.

I'd agree with this. I was at Intel early on and as they expanded they were very careful about exactly replicating fabs because they didn't want an increase in defects.

For most (all?) manufacturers bringing a new factory online that didn't produce exactly the same level of quality would be red flag to re-evaluate how they brought on new capacity.

Defects are inherent to anything involving human labor. You can't expect workers on 12hr shifts to have consistent high quality of throughput. It has nothing to do with expansion and more to do with people just getting lazy or negligent throughout the day.

Maybe not let people work 12 hour shifts? This isn't the 19th century.

But we talk about Musk, who is absolutely clear how he views workers and at this point we know how he treats them too (and himself, which is a textbook example of unhealthy obsessive behavior among other unhealthy stuff coming from high performing broken mind). He makes it trivial to have a love/hate 'relationship' with him, for better or worse.

Fun to watch from the distance, just not grokking all those early adopters. I have small kids, there are risks I take also with them but they are always calculated and control is on our side. This is just blindly trusting some startup mentality scales well into giga factories level.

Some people like 12 hour shifts? You make more money and your commuting expense per hour of work goes down.

The alternative is that someone who wants to make more money takes a second job somewhere else. Then they're working 16 hours a day and have two commutes. What does 16 hours of work and 6 hours of sleep do for quality?

how about 7hour shifts and enough pay to sustain a family with that?

How about two hour shifts that pay a million dollars an hour? You can't change the market rate for that kind of labor by magic; employers are operating in a competitive market. You can get more money by working more hours.

> employers are operating in a competitive market

Let's see; Musk is demanding that the board give him a 56B pay package.

Tesla seems to have about 130K employees. They could afford to give every employee a 400K raise and Musk still gets a fortune from the left over money.

So money doesn't seem to be very tight there, it's just that greed demands that a single person gets it all.

Tesla is a public company. If the board doesn't think Elon Musk is worth that amount of money, they don't have to pay it to him, and have the incentive not to -- the shareholders would get to keep the money instead. But maybe he is worth that amount of money; he's a one-man marketing machine and owns a major social media company that can influence the public perception of the company. That could very well be worth that amount of money to the company over a period of years -- and it isn't a single year's compensation.

So then we're back to it being a competitive market. If the company gets e.g. $60B in value from having Elon Musk, and he knows this and demands $56B, the company can either pay the market price or have a net loss of $4B relative to the alternative. And then have even less money to pay employees.

Or maybe he isn't worth that much and if the shareholders give it to him then it's costing the company money. But then that's maladaptive and the company will lose business to some other company that pays its executives less and uses the money to lower the price of their cars and gain a competitive advantage while still paying the market rate for other types of labor.

Either way it doesn't change the market price for those other types of labor, which are much easier to estimate than the value of certain unusual executives.

> If the board doesn't think Elon Musk is worth that amount of money, they don't have to pay it to him

Well, if you're following that drama, that is how it is supposed to work and how the Delaware judge said it needs to work.

So, now Musk just want to move the incorporation to TX, where he can order the board to pay him whatever he wants without oversight.

The compensation package was approved by the shareholders, not just the board, but then the judge didn't like the disclosures for the shareholder vote and invalidated it. Musk obviously didn't like that and is now behaving in the usual way, but whatever. He's going to put it up for another vote and the shareholders are going to approve it again or they won't.

The shareholders would pay for Musk's pay package by having their shares diluted. It's not as if Tesla has to provide any money for that, so it's not really comparable to giving employees a raise.

Money is money. In theory they could dilute the shareholders by issuing new shares into the market and use the money to pay employees more. But this fails to identify what magic is to be used to cause them to want to do that.

Employers (and employees) generally have a pretty good idea what the market price is for a particular job. If they have to fill 100 positions and offering $25/hour causes them to get 100 qualified applicants who accept the position, they could offer $35/hour, but this is like saying that the employees could accept $15/hour when another employer is offering $25. Some explanation is required for why they would.

> so it's not really comparable to giving employees a raise

Employees can (and most often are) paid in those company shares as well, so no difference.

Magic does exist. Rephrase it as regulation. Just think the minimum wage with current day inflation for 1968 is just less than $15 an hour. Deregulation and push for top 1% profits and shareholders has pushed wages down over 50%. This cuts into long term economic growth and mobility.

Reading most of your comments. You support treating works terribly by rejecting work life balance. For example, my brother in law will boast about working 100 hours in a week and in the same breath complain about having no time for himself or his family.

A strong labor force is only true when it is mentally, physically, and emotionally healthy.

> Just think the minimum wage with current day inflation for 1968 is just less than $15 an hour.

Less than 2% of people make minimum wage and the few who do wouldn't be making significantly less if it didn't exist. The primary effect of minimum wage laws is to eliminate internship opportunities. The primary effect of raising them to the point that they applied to a non-trivial percentage of workers would be to accelerate automation and offshoring.

This is why workers keep getting screwed. People ask for the wrong things.

> Reading most of your comments. You support treating works terribly by rejecting work life balance.

These are individual choices, and this is the problem with most feel good regulations. If someone is working 12 hours, maybe it's because they can't otherwise afford rent -- but then instead of doing something about high rents, you want to prohibit them from working enough hours to pay their bills.

> Deregulation and push for top 1% profits and shareholders has pushed wages down over 50%.

Younger generations are struggling because things cost more, specifically housing, medicine and education. These all have regulatory causes.

Zoning rules, licensing rules and building codes inhibit housing construction, keeping supply low and prices high.

The law promotes employer-provided health insurance, preventing employees from choosing not only where to get healthcare but even where to get insurance, since that's chosen by their employer. Then we pretend this is a market-based system even though we've disconnected choices from costs through the law, and wonder why Americans pay more for healthcare than anyone else.

The government promotes student loans. It doesn't pay for tuition, it subsidizes loan interest and prohibits the loans from being discharged in bankruptcy, allowing colleges to raise tuition into the sky without losing students. Then people have to repay that debt for decades, instead of using the money to buy a house.

"Deregulation" is a nonsense word with no specific meaning. If the state government passed a law removing local zoning restrictions, is that regulation or deregulation? It doesn't matter. What matters is that they haven't done it and now housing is unaffordable.

Yeah, it is impossible to compete against chinese / indian / kenyan slaves.

It is also hard to compete against people earning hardly enough to eat and sleep in a crowded apartment, no healthcare, even no papers. (In the US, I mean)

The problem is not regulation / deregulation. The problem is the right regulation for a few (your Musk) but wrong for the rest (your 12hrs, 16hrs, or whatever hours a day you think are fair)

> Yeah, it is impossible to compete against chinese / indian / kenyan slaves.

Not actually that hard. You build a machine that does the work of 1000 sweat shop workers, then you have a domestic job maintaining the machine, and paying one salary when it used to be 1000 causes the transportation cost to dominate over the cost of labor so now you're back to domestic manufacturing being cheaper.

But only if you don't pass dumb laws that discourage the automation and convert it into offshoring.

> It is also hard to compete against people earning hardly enough to eat and sleep in a crowded apartment, no healthcare, even no papers. (In the US, I mean)

Why is that hard? The majority of the population is already doing it. You learn to do skilled labor and then earn more money.

> The problem is the right regulation for a few (your Musk) but wrong for the rest (your 12hrs, 16hrs, or whatever hours a day you think are fair)

The problem is that people think these kinds of laws are the problem. If you can't afford rent working 8 hours and have to work 12, how is prohibiting you from working 12 going to help you make rent? It's misdirection to keep people from solving the actual problem, which is high cost of living.

Have you ever worked a 12 hour shift? Ever worked 4 10s?

You know how you’re mentally checked out of a job after 4 to 6 hours? That doesn’t get better after 8.

A 12 hour shift means you’re in a bit of a mental fog half the day.

It depends what kind of work it is, and what kind of shape you're in. Some people have more endurance than others. If you're not capable of doing some work, you can do other work; that's no reason to say that someone who is capable of it should be deprived of the income.

So because someone can take more of a beating than I can, it makes it somehow okay?

If someone is capable of doing work, and wants to because they'd make more money, what right do you have to prohibit them from doing it just because you can't?

What kind of work are you imagining where there's no brainwork involved and no danger to the project or other employees if a tired worker makes mistakes?

I think you're operating on too many hypotheticals and not quite enough personal experience.

Many types of manufacturing. If you're making e.g. textiles, and being tired means you occasionally produce something that gets tossed out by quality control, this is not obviously a danger to anyone so it's just a cost trade off in wasted material vs. benefits of operating the factory for longer hours.

Many types of emergency response or on-call work. You just got off an 8 hour shift when an emergency happens. The cost of mistakes you make from being tired can be less than the cost of waiting 16 hours before responding to the emergency or leaving it to someone unqualified.

Generically anything where the cost of occasional mistakes is low or they can be detected before they have a major impact.

But also, the point is that different people have different levels of endurance. Some people will be making more mistakes after 6 hours than someone else would be making after 12.

> Many types of manufacturing. If you're making e.g. textiles, and being tired means you occasionally produce something that gets tossed out by quality control, this is not obviously a danger to anyone so it's just a cost trade off in wasted material vs. benefits of operating the factory for longer hours.

Do you have any idea how much those machines cost, how easy it is to destroy them, or how quickly they'll remove the skin from your body? If some exhausted bonehead crashes a line how long will it take for repairs? Do you have spare parts on hand? Do they still make spares?

> Many types of emergency response or on-call work. You just got off an 8 hour shift when an emergency happens.

That's not a 12 hour shift, that's an 8 hour shift moving into triple overtime. Everyone involved in your scenario is fully aware that they're rolling the dice on people's lives due to an emergency.

> But also, the point is that different people have different levels of endurance. Some people will be making more mistakes after 6 hours than someone else would be making after 12.

I'm assuming everyone has the same level of endurance because I'm not willing to gamble my livelihood on the self-awareness of some random asshole off the street. It doesn't matter how much they want to work if their output isn't making us money.

> Do you have any idea how much those machines cost, how easy it is to destroy them, or how quickly they'll remove the skin from your body? If some exhausted bonehead crashes a line how long will it take for repairs? Do you have spare parts on hand? Do they still make spares?

Sewing machines? Not that expensive, not that easy to destroy and the typical injury would be that you get stuck with a sewing needle.

It seems like you want to assume that every job involves some kind of delicate yet fatality-inducing industrial equipment. It doesn't.

> That's not a 12 hour shift, that's an 8 hour shift moving into triple overtime. Everyone involved in your scenario is fully aware that they're rolling the dice on people's lives due to an emergency.

It's a person working for 12 contiguous hours, because the benefits outweigh the costs.

> I'm assuming everyone has the same level of endurance because I'm not willing to gamble my livelihood on the self-awareness of some random asshole off the street. It doesn't matter how much they want to work if their output isn't making us money.

And if they're willing to work and the output is making you money?

The proposal is to ban people from working for more than 8 hours. You don't need a law for any of the cases where it isn't in the employer's interests to do it anyway. They just won't choose to do it in those cases then.

So far your thought experiment involves someone with an athlete’s endurance who’s willing to spend half of their day on a menial task for three days out of five? A little unclear on the last part since you don’t seem to understand how overtime is calculated.

Your concerns are a corner case.

> So far your thought experiment involves someone with an athlete’s endurance who’s willing to spend half of their day on a menial task for three days out of five?

It could just be a job that isn't that tiring.

And why does it have to be three days out of five? Paying time and a half for four out of twelve hours could be worth it over paying benefits and overhead for another employee.

> A little unclear on the last part since you don’t seem to understand how overtime is calculated.

How are overtime calculations even relevant? If it isn't worth it for the employer to pay overtime in some context it would be required then banning 12 hour shifts would be irrelevant there because they wouldn't be happening to begin with.

> Your concerns are a corner case.

12 hour shifts are a corner case. Stop trying to ban everything atypical.

While young and in as good shape as I ever have been I once worked a low-wage manufacturing job in a factory. After a long shift I once sliced through my fingernail[1] because I fell asleep while operating an industrial bench saw. At the time (before this incident) I would certainly have said that I had plenty of endurance to work long hours in the job and I definitely needed the money.

Worker protections exist partly to prevent low-wage earners from having their economic desperation exploited by the unscrupulous to their detriment.

[1] It's only through a pure miracle that I didn't lose a finger. The specific miracle being I was so tired setting up the saw that this one time I set the depth of cut wrong meaning that instead of chopping my fingers completely off as would have happened had I set the saw up correctly, it just sliced through the very top of my fingernail.

> Worker protections exist partly to prevent low-wage earners from having their economic desperation exploited by the unscrupulous to their detriment.

"Worker protections" exist mainly because people misunderstand the causes and solutions to economic desperation.

How does it benefit you to have to take a second job and work 16 hours a day instead of allowing your first employer to give you overtime that you actually want? Would you have been less tired by adding a second commute to your day?

I wouldn’t have believed this when I was a teenager but as an adult I know it to be true. I’ve worked with guys who knock out 10 hour days everyday with an hour commute to and from work. I could only keep it up for three months at a time but immigrants and guys fresh out of the military are machines.

A bunch of people think they're good at working 12 hour shifts. Almost none of them are. There is an absolute mountain of fatigue research that bears this out. Truck drivers and pilots are legally prohibited from working more than a certain amount of hours in a given period because if their performance suffers, people die. Personally, I'd prefer the same apply to whoever happens to be installing the accelerator pedal on my car.

Sure, you can let people work as many hours as they possibly want, you're just making a decision that someone other than those workers and the companies that employ them is going to pay the externalities for all of their quality deficiencies. We have hour restrictions because people can't consent to being killed by a tired truck driver.

> There is an absolute mountain of fatigue research that bears this out.

Any kind of sound research is going to conclude that a physically fit and healthy person has more endurance than a sickly and out of shape person. The former can work more hours than the latter in actual fact.

> Truck drivers and pilots are legally prohibited from working more than a certain amount of hours in a given period because if their performance suffers, people die.

Truck drivers and pilots are legally prohibited from working more than a certain number of hours because some of them are sickly and out of shape, if those ones were to work 12 hour shifts then people would die, and that provides a convenient excuse for their lobbyists to demand rules that reduce the labor supply.

It's a truism to say healthy people are healthier than unhealthy people. Of course they are. The point isn't that healthy people can work more than unhealthy people, it's that all people - even healthy people, even young people, even experts - have a much lower tolerance for stress and fatigue than they think they do, and their performance at the limit degrades quickly.

The issue is that the limit is in a different place for different people. One person's performance is degraded by hour 6 as much as another's is by hour 10, so it makes no sense to limit them both to 8 hours -- the first presumably shouldn't even be working 6.

There is also the question of where to stop. Suppose that the average person's performance is degraded by 5% after 4 hours. Should everyone stop after 4 hours then? They're not at peak performance anymore. But 95% is often good enough. And maybe 90% is good enough. Maybe 80% is good enough. Maybe 75% is good enough and one person is at 75% after 8 hours. Maybe only 90% is good enough but it's a different kind of work and then the same person is still at 90% after 14 hours. Maybe you're at 85% after 8 hours but get back to 90% with a cup of coffee.

There is no one size fits all.

It's not necessary to think that one size fits all to think that 12 hours is too long. There is plenty of evidence that long shifts affect cognitive functioning[1] and so it could well be reasonable to say we don't know where the safe threshold is for each person so there may be some individuals who might otherwise safely work with no impairment but in the interest of safety for users of the cars we can set some cap at less than 12 hours.

Secondly, even if someone was to show that some workers are still able to function well, make good decisions and not make manufacturing errors that would likely impact safety after 12 hours it might still be reasonable to not have such long shifts because the length for some workers would tend to compell all workers (including some for whom that shift length would be too much) to work the long shift if they want to keep their job. There is lots of research associating long shifts with chronic health problems[2] and poor wellbeing for example[3] .

[1] https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/18/12/6540

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7117719/

[3] https://journals.lww.com/joem/Fulltext/2020/04000/A_Qualitat...

> There is plenty of evidence that long shifts affect cognitive functioning[1]

That study attributes much of the deficit to interrupting circadian rhythms, which is the thing that isn't required with 12 hour shifts, because the other 12 hours a day can contain a consistent 8 hour block for sleeping at night. Whereas the alternative where you bring on a second shift with different workers does exactly that, because now the second shift is e.g 5PM-1AM and by the time those workers go home, eat a meal and get ready for bed, they're sleeping in the daylight. Or if the business is one that operates 24 hours, using 8 hours shifts causes there to be two night shifts instead of one.

> Secondly, even if someone was to show that some workers are still able to function well, make good decisions and not make manufacturing errors that would likely impact safety after 12 hours it might still be reasonable to not have such long shifts because the length for some workers would tend to compell all workers (including some for whom that shift length would be too much) to work the long shift if they want to keep their job.

This is a fully generic argument. Maybe some workers have heart disease and shouldn't do a job that involves lifting. Does that mean no one should be able to do it? People over 65 disproportionately suffer from various forms of dementia. Should they be prohibited from working if they want to, even the ones who are healthy?

Most jobs don't use 12 hour shifts because they don't want to pay overtime, so it's hard to see how anyone who prefers a job with 8 hour shifts could be forced to take one of those instead of the majority of other jobs that use 8 hour shifts.

> There is lots of research associating long shifts with chronic health problems[2] and poor wellbeing for example[3] .

We need to be extremely careful with correlational studies. There is evidence that all kinds of negative outcomes are associated with poverty, and the people working long hours are typically doing it because they don't have enough money. What happens when you say they can't work that much and make them even poorer?

That's gonna be tougher when they just fired 10% of the work force.

Those lazy employees and their 12 hour shifts...

If long shifts impact production quality (and they do) run shorter shifts.

YC startup founders work longer than 12 hour shifts all the time...

YC startup founders do not work shifts.

Startup founders spend a lot of time on their project and it can be hard to do, but I don’t think I’d label the effort “work” for the same reasons I don’t think of home improvements as a duty or chore.

1. They talk about doing this a whole lot more than they actually do it

2. "I worked twelve hours today [not including unlimited bathroom breaks, social breaks, snack breaks, drink breaks, YouTube breaks, going on a walk to clear my head breaks]"

3. To the extent that anyone actually does this with any consistency, it's a laughable example of poor self-management and company leadership

4. It's an example of poor self-management and leadership for the same reason it's bad on assembly lines: it produces bad work

5. They're not building safety-critical devices they're putting out onto public roads

Haven't done YC but did Techstars a while back when they were still in the same league, and except on the week before demo day there was pretty much never anyone at the place after 6pm (except for the handful of foreign teams who didn't have anything do to in their life in the US).

Apples to oranges. Tesla manufactures cars with much more liability.

True, but I was talking about a change in the rate of defects. If rapid expansion is causing a greater number of defects than is normal, then something about that expansion is likely the root cause.

In the big picture, of course, everything has defects.

> You can't expect workers on 12hr shifts to have consistent high quality of throughput.

Nor should we. We should expect the company to prioritize safety and hire more people to avoid such mistakes.

Or even if you want to keep that awful 12h shift practice, at the very least have good procedures and quality control to ensure failures from those "lazy" workers don't leave the factory.

Umm manufacturing, think of healthcare. It's not uncommon for inpatient nursing to do 12-hour shifts and doctors do seven of days/nights of 12-hour shifts.

As a followup to this, in this Techcrunch article[1] it says that all 3,878 Cybertrucks shipped to date have been recalled. That isn't a lot of cars. Apart from what it says about sales of the Cybertruck, that suggests they haven't had enough customer miles on these things yet to flesh out the more subtle issues.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2024/04/19/tesla-cybertruck-throttle-...

> Apart from what it says about sales of the Cybertruck,

What? It says nothing about Cybertruck sales and everything about how slow they've been to ramp up production.

Tesla has a well-known history of being slow to put a new model into production. I find it odd that you would assume less than 4,000 Cybertrucks have been sold because of lack of interest.

Musk said last November they had capacity then for 125,000 trucks a year. Are you saying he lied to us?

Why are there even gas pedals? Musk said self driving is a solved problem.

Yeah. He's been known to do that.

Also isn’t a recall is a good thing for consumers? It means Tesla is fixing an error, not ignoring it.

Absolutely, its good they are proactively fixing things, this particular issue with uncontrolled acceleration was particularly dangerous.

In the US, consumer liability laws make these fixes mandatory but it is always better when a manufacturer voluntarily recalls a product than when it is ordered to by some oversight agency.

Would this not classify as reactive since it is happening 3 weeks after hearing about it from a customer?

Proactive, in this case, means “before they are legally required to.”

If they waited until NHTSA performed their investigation and made a recall request (which is how the heavy majority of the recalls in the US are performed), that would be reactive.

> Proactive, in this case, means “before they are legally required to.”

Actually not.

"creating or controlling a situation rather than just responding to it after it has happened."

Actually it does :-). I get that being pedantic can be fun but if you actually forcibly misinterpret things base on pedantry you might find it doesn't serve you nearly as well as actually thinking about what was "meant".

Seems pretty scary to me that the supposed error causing uncontrolled acceleration is a little soap near interior matts. I guess I've been called a pig for not being extremely reckless with the cars I've owned.

Soap in the glue joint between the accelerator pedal and its cover. You won't cause this by cleaning your car with soap

Yes I would love it if Honda would admit that the transmission on the Odyssey is bonkers but seems like they'll claim it's WAI until a lawsuit happens

Yes and no.

Yes, because recalls are a good thing, because the manuf. has acknowledged the issue and is trying to address it.

No, because what glue sniffing idiot thought glue would be the best option, instead of just riveting the damn thing down, and never worrying about the pretty little piece of garbage coming loose and sticking the accel pedal down.

Fasteners are very expensive from a production perspective because they take a long time to install. This is why products these days are designed to be assemble with conformal, friction, or snap fit as much as possible.

Deciding to sub in fasteners in the production line would have involved addition of at least one new position in the line to install the fasteners.

Agreed, to a point, but we're talking about the accel pedal in a vehicle with more torque than god.

Glue is insufficient. It was insufficient with it was decided. It was insufficient when it was implemented and while I'm not a car designer, I can state that glue, in this case? Predictably insufficient.

For a halo vehicle that's typical volume.

There are numerous car companies with those sorts of sales numbers on a particular model and they don't have these issues, mostly because they aren't stupid enough to make their own stuff. Rolls Royce doesn't make their own gas pedal; they go to a company that makes them.

Nearly every problem Tesla has can be attributed to Musk's insistence that he knows better than an industry that is extremely cutthroat and has learned lessons from a century of being in business. He has been propped up by customers and VCs who think that means the auto industry is "stodgy", when really they didn't understand all the reasons things are done the way they are.

It's like the fresh college grad who comes onto the SW eng team having made some clever app while he was a sophomore...and says "oh you're doing it all wrong" to senior engineers.

One major mistake Musk made is confusing "big five" (GM, Ford, Stellantis, Toyota, VAG) ambivalence toward electric cars with incompetence. In Ford's case that is fairly accurate - the Mach E is an engineering embarrassment, the Lightning less so, probably because there is enormous organizational pressure to not fuck up in the product line that is their bread and butter.

VAG has demonstrated great competency at EVs (Porsche and Audi mostly) at the high end of the market...and once GM really gets its Ultium platform going, Tesla is well and truly fucked if they intend to keep making cars instead of just shifting to being an 'electric gas station' company...but they're on their heels there too, having slept while CCS surpassed their charging standard years ago.

I don't think anyone thinks traditional auto is incompetent at manufacturing.

I think lots of people have their doubts about the strategic product vision of big auto executives, who traditionally have tactically chased short-term profit margins with tunnel vision that would make GE cringe.

> There are numerous car companies with those sorts of sales numbers on a particular model and they don't have these issues

Recalls are absolutely routine in this industry, though. This sounds like a semantic argument hiding behind "these issues" as being somehow different from "those" issues?

A gas station is one of the least glamorous, and lowest margin business out there.

You’re basically making no money from the gas or electricity, and all your profits comes from the chips and other stuff you sell inside.

Tesla is severely problematic as a company, but its salvation does not come from pivoting to selling vapes while people wait for their charge to finish.

Subcontracting everything out and being an assembly company contributed to the quality issues Boeing faces now. Perhaps the root cause is lack of focus on safety & quality.

> What they missed was the after action surveillance and analysis.

Isn’t that literally an unprofessional error? The big three already have this as standard operating procedure. Tesla still seems to be treating building cars like devops: move fast and break things, but don’t worry about the break things part until it’s bad enough that end users start complaining in a public forum.

> I don't think it is an unprofessional error, there are many reasons that changes get introduced on the manufacturing line which benefit production speed and/or reduce errors.

I think you missed "unapproved".

“What they missed was the after action surveillance and analysis.”

So you agree with the parent, you just don’t think Tesla was “unprofessional”. You can split hairs all you want over what specific process or check or diagnostic or paperwork did or didn’t get done. It doesn’t change the outcome — shipping 4K super expensive cars to long suffering customers to only almost immediately have a serious safety recall? That’s unprofessional.

Tesla should have been going over these with a fine-tooth comb! This is the first iteration of an entirely new vehicle platform for the company, its first time working with steel for body panels, its first time* implementing steer by wire tech, etc etc. why isn’t every single one of these first few thousand heavily scrutinized? Insane.

Okay.

To deconstruct your argument a bit, as I understand it to be this:

"This car costs a lot of money and has been delayed several times, thus during that time a 'professional' car making company would have found, and fixed, the accelerator pedal defect."

If that accurately reflects your claim, then would that be true of any car company that allowed a manufacturing or design defect to "escape" in one of their very expensive cars? Because this has happened to many (most?) of them[1].

To me, that either puts Tesla in very good company or says the entire auto industry is shite.

If you read through the linked article (it isn't that long) you may notice that a lot of the defects that resulted in recalls seem "obvious" or things that QA would catch. That is the "x-ray vision of hindsight" as my grandfather used to call it, which is that once you can see something it seems really easy to see.

Building a car from the frame up is a very complex engineering task, and there thousands and thousands of hours invested in catching things before the product is sold, but the reality is that it is really really difficult to catch a problem you don't know about before it leaves the factory. In the software world we used to have these really long customer test cycles called "alpha" and then "beta" for we got to "release candidate", the whole point of that was to put customer hours on the very complex software to help identify the problems we couldn't see as developers. That process sort of went away when it became possible to instantly download a new copy of the program, so you could send it to everyone and fix bugs that would propagate through online updates. Games loved it, you'd get a 650MB CD that you'd put into your computer to install and it would start by downloading an entirely re-written game because so much had changed between the making of the CD and the actual product. Before this you had to send new release media tapes or a CD, and the customer would uninstall and reinstall the software. It was painful.

You can't do that with hard goods of course, you can just drive into the dealership every week and swap out your current Cybertruck for the model currently coming off the assembly line. So defects like this are rather inevitable.

In my opinion, that defects both exist and make it into the field isn't "unprofessional". And when I wrote the first comment I didn't realize they had sold less than 4000 cars, so clearly they were paying some attention and they seem to have done the right thing by recalling them. To me, and this is just my take on things of course, that feels more professional than unprofessional.

[1] https://www.lambocars.com/known-supercar-recalls-in-automoti...

I’m not a Tesla-stan but I can give this one a “it could have happened to any manufacturer” explanation.

Soap is a common method for getting rubber pads onto metal pedals in the aftermarket world. Dish soap dries out and becomes less slippery, unlike lithium grease or other options. It is possible it was carried over from an appropriate and approved installation method for top hinged pedals, where pressing down will push the rubber pad’s grove deeper into the metal shoe and not cause removal. For bottom hinged pedals, preferred for performance cars, I wouldn’t recommend that at all.

One off possibility is that this is NUMI knowledge making its way to Tesla ownership.

I don’t disagree with the takeaway though. If they were trying to Toyota Method/Six Sigma this assembly line properly, they’d have reviewed and approved the change as part of a periodic process and it wouldn’t have been “unapproved” and probably would not be the process they used.

Adding to my “it could have happened to any manufacturer” my EV Porsche comes with a NEMA 14-50 plug/pigtale that was previously only approved for use in 16 Amp EVSEs. The wire says 16A only (10 or 12ga wire is in use). However, they kept using these on 40 amp capable EVSEs. Over the years many 14-50 outlets and these plugs have melted. Through that time Porsche blamed low quality outlets and recommended an industrial model, but the plugs then melted instead of the outlet. Only this year did they issue a recall. This is extremely similar to an issue that happened with Tesla’s EVSE plug adapters. Porsche managed to make the same exact mistake years later despite that being an easy situation to reference.

https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/rcl/2023/RCMN-23V841-8821.pdf

https://www.tesla.com/support/adapter-recall

> One off possibility is that this is NUMI knowledge making its way to Tesla ownership.

Good point. While this was in Texas instead of there, it likely still applies. Given that this is early production, they were likely using some of their most experienced workers, possibly even as transfers from the other plant.

It is easy to imagine them transferring an approach like this ("it was approved before") without realizing that the consequences might be different.

The pedals are manufactured (and likely assembled with the pad) by a supplier in Canada, according to https://www.cybertruckownersclub.com/forum/threads/nhtsa-off...

This reminds me of the supposed factory floor modification to include a battery heat sink on the Model Y. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24424567

I'm kind of uneasy about this being possible at all. Obviously this is just because of the power of hindsight, but should things that can wedge the accelerator in full throttle position be using adhesive for fixation at all?

I just took my car in and there were 4 active recalls to address (Hyundai). This is hardly unique to Tesla.

> Because this looks like a very unprofessional error to have made for a company that has done well up until now.

bro their QA has been garbage since day 1. they've gotten better but this isn't really a surprise.

You're aware the other legacy manufactures have recalls all the time, right?

In the book about Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson, design engineers have their offices next to the manufacturing line. So they see and hear everything going on. It probably wasn't just "someone on the production line".

Manufacturing is super complex - employees and robots performing thousands of interconnected tasks, sometimes requiring a little bit of judgement, and never 100% supervised.

Even a mature operation like Toyota and Ford can blunder.

For me it was a situation where I've never heard of another case, so I guess highly anecdotal, but can see how it might have applied to millions of regular old Ford ICE cars that were on the road.

At one end of the accelerator linkage is the "user interface" (gas pedal) and at the other end it's the entire V8 engine. Where the linkage connects directly to the throttle using optimized leverage and failure-mitigating springs that can overcome a number of foreseeable failure scenarios. Which had gradually been improved since the Model T and through the entire Space Age.

Runaway acceleration wasn't a problem with the pedal.

Engine was running properly too. And the linkage was perfect.

Well the engine is heavy and is not bolted directly to the frame of the car, instead it uses motor mounts, which consist of a metal plate which bolts to the motor, and an opposite plate that bolts to the frame, separated by a thick hard rubber shock absorbing pad.

Motor mounts are doing some of their isolation duty when you see an idling engine under the hood shimmying a little while the fenders and hood are nicely stationary.

Anyway it took years to figure out because it happened so seldom, and the cause & effect were so widely separated in time, but one day while navigating a jeep trail the engine had bottomed out, and that must have been the time one of the motor mounts separated, while the engine was momentarily forced an inch or more away from its normal position.

Nothing ever seemed any different, but every once in while when I would accelerate from a stop, the pedal would drop almost to the floor and it would really take off until I got my foot under the pedal and pulled it back.

Turns out the torque was occasionally capable of twisting the engine in the direction away from the broken mount, enough to be pulling on the linkage, opening the throttle further, and resulting in more torque. Might have had something to do with the octane of the gasoline in use.

I guess at either end of the linkage you want the rubber to be bonded to the metal a lot better than you might think at first.

"Show me the incentive, I'll show you the outcome". I do not know anything of the culture of Tesla and am not commenting on it specifically, and that quote could apply just as much to a company like Boeing. But at companies working on safety-critical products, the problems usually arise from employees acting in their own self interest to do what will get them rewarded for shipping on time, or to avoid punishment for causing delays.

I picked up a car from a mechanic the other day and we got to riffing about my own Tesla. He admitted to having friends that worked at Tesla on the manufacturing line. In his own words, these guys are “complete idiots,” and “do shrooms before assembling cars.”

I want to take his words with a grain of salt, but…I kinda believe it. Obviously hearsay means nothing, though.

I mean I don’t doubt that the some people working the assembly lines are getting a little messed-up before their shifts.

Our classic mini from Australia has other production anomalies, you kinda just chock it up to the workers being a little drunk during its construction.

“for a company that has done well up until now.”

Haven’t there been widespread complaints about manufacturing defects (poorly-fit panels, unexpected braking, wheels falling off, suspensions collapsing, axles breaking). They tend to rank at or near the bottom in quality surveys. Alfa Romeo comes out ahead of them. Even before Elon Musk’s antics turned me off the idea of buying a Tesla, I held off the possibility of buying one because the price/quality proposition was not great.

Done well and avoided costly errors are not similies

This is problably some contract manufacturer that delivers the assembly.

I was curious how frequently automakers have recalls, because it seems to me that Elon linked companies tend to get treated 'differently' by the media. The answer was extremely surprising. Here is a list. [1] Just in 2022:

Ford - 67

Volkswagen - 46

Daimler Trucks North America - 42

Chrysler - 38

Mercedes Benz - 34

GM - 32

Kia - 24

Hyundai - 22

Tesla - 20

BMW - 20

Pretty wild, because these rarely if ever make the news.

[1] - https://www.carpro.com/blog/automakers-with-the-most-recalls...

It should also be noted that most of those Tesla "recalls" are over the air software updates that happen automatically. This one is noteworthy because the owners have to physically bring their vehicle to the service center.

That is objectively not true https://www.tesla.com/support/annual-and-recall-service

You are right. This makes it 9 of the 20 that were just software updates.

Well that puts a damper on the oft-stated claim that Tesla makes superior software. Sounds like they are relying on their frequent OTA updates to allow them to half-ass the initial design and just fix it later.

True, but that ends up comparing not so bad to traditional car makers that half-ass their software and then never update it.

Most of the Tesla recalls are just software updates that are done from home over the air

Source?

Anyone who owns a Tesla knows this

A minority of people own Tesla's.

But is the difference that it's just a software update or that it's OTA?

https://www.barrons.com/articles/tesla-recalls-262ec9a7

The article has a chart that sources NHTSA data.

“Most” is pulling a lot of undeserved weight there.

Some recalls have been software updates. There have been plenty (like rear camera harnesses failing, the media CPU overheating, rear seatbelts being incorrectly attached, faulty MMC modules, and the incident being talked about here) that have required hardware fixes.

>“Most” is pulling a lot of undeserved weight there.

So were most OTA updates or not? That is either objectively true or objectively false, not "pulling a lot of undeserved weight".

This is a good point. As long as Tesla continuously churns out software that breaks the car the percentage of “woops the accelerator stuck because they mixed soap with the pedal glue” issues gets smaller and thus less relevant

Then there wouldn't be 20 recalls in total. But there were 20 in total in that year.

Exactly

I've had several recalls done on my Model Y. 100% of them were OTA software updates.

It seems like that most of them are software, regardless of the metric chosen (number of units recalled or number of recalls).

How many of the others are software updates but without the possibility of OTA?

I don't think that single number by itself says very much though as it's not normalised, for example by the number of different product lines a manufacturer produces or the total number of vehicles manufactured.

Why would you normalize by number of vehicles sold?

If a large-volume vehicle gets recalled, it should be a bigger news story than a niche car.

It sounds like they're talking about normalizing by number of models (SKUs) not number of units.

But in the case of Tesla, I would still want to know normalized since those niche cars are being trumpeted as mroe revolutionary and better than everyone else.

Actually their post suggested both normalizations (notice the word "or"), however both are flawed.

"Being trumpeted as [more] revolutionary" still has nothing to do with number of models and/or units. If you only give extra attention to certain brands because of their marketing, just say so. There's no need to connect it to unrelated factors, and there's no need to introduce 'normalizations' that don't normalize for anything.

Maybe you wouldn't - my thought was that (to exaggerate) if company A produces 10 vehicles and issues 5 recalls, whereas company B produces 1,000,000 vehicles and issues 10 recalls, then company B isn't doing twice as badly as company A despite issuing twice as many recalls, because they've manufactured 100,000 times as many vehicles, and we probably need to factor that in somehow. Likewise the number of vehicles affected by each recall.

As the other commenter said, I also think number of SKUs is important as each one represents a different design and BOM.

Of course Elon gets treated differently. No other car company CEO is on Twitter drawing attention to himself like Elon. Tesla itself is also the darling car company of the decade, with the highest market cap. And the Cybertruck, by design, is basically a celebrity on wheels on every road/parking lot it traverses.

I’d be blown away if a full recall of the cybertruck wasn’t top headline news.

This is one of those things that makes no sense about the Elon/Trump fanbase(s): they engage in absolutely incessant, flamboyant exuberance at every word out of their mouth to the degree it is nearly impossible to escape it, short of unplugging the internet and TV. Then they act shocked when negative news is also amplified.

Like yeah, there are both rewards and hazards to placing yourself in the spotlight 24/7/365. As there should be.

No other car company is as overvalued on the stock market.

And an accelerator pedal stuck in full acceleration state, on a vehicle that can go from 0-100 in 3 seconds, allegedly because of an unapproved, amateuristic change on the production line, is an excellent case-in-point of how detached from reality that valuation is.

Mistakes happen, but when such a life-threatening mistake happens, yet again, because of corner cutting and because the basics of quality control of car production are not mastered, it deserves all the bad press it gets.

Why'd he even put a gas pedal in there? Isn't self driving a solved problem?

They rarely make the tech news. There's plenty reporting on recalls in traditional media[1][2][3][4][etc]. I think a lot of Tesla fans have a persecution complex when it comes to reporting on Tesla.

[1] https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-toyota-cana...

[2] https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/international-busin...

[3] https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-toyota-cana...

[4] https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-ford-recalls-...

You're saying tech news and the articles that make HN's front page make a lot of tech people wrongly assume that Tesla is way worse with recalls than other car companies? Like we are seeing all over the comments here.

Looks like "a lot of Tesla fans" are right then. Now add the fact that headlines and HN post titles about Tesla software recalls omitting that it's a software update and just stating that millions of Tesla cars are being recalled. A neutral observer would agree but not Tesla haters.

For clarity, the specific recall talked about in this article is not a software update. You can’t software update a stuck accelerator pedal.

How many recalls of the other manufacturers are software updates just without the possibility, of OTA?

How many different models do the other manufacturers have, how many has Tesla?

And don't forget that Musk acts like Tesla is special and doesn't have the same problems as the old lame boring companies.

Tf are you arguing?

The OTA is the crucial point because as a customer you just don’t care that you wake up one day and your tesla starts displaying PARK instead of an icon after a „recall”. With other vehicles you gotta schedule service and leave it there.

My point is that other manufacturers' recalls could also be simple software updates but without OTA you need to visit a garage.

So just because Tesla could fix most of their problem oer OTA doesn't mean other manufacturers have more severe malfunctions, just a more complicated way of fixing it.

And OTA is nice until someone finds an unfixable bug and changes your brake setting per malicious OTA.

As a customer, I do care if someone can change important systems in my car without me noticing or being able to prevent it.

If it's a software update that only a service center can fix then few folks are going to take their time out to do that expeditiously, like with hardware recalls. Assuming their address is current and they even know about it. Whereas an OTA update is either automatically done or in their face the next time they drive.

But the method of fixing doesn't say anything about the severity.

If the breaks on a Tesla don't work but it's fixable per OTA it's still worse than a less severe bug that needs to be fixed in a garage.

The cost to the company for a recall is also a thing so accurate headlines matter. Having to spend money paying service reps to do software and hardware changes at a service center is way more expensive than pushing out an OTA software. Which is why a good chunk of the media won't mention it when it comes to Tesla.

At least the fanboys seem ok with using the word ‘recall’ this time!

I think the issue was that the headlines omitted the fact that it was a software update changing the size of some icons in the car's UI. And instead just stated that millions of Tesla cars were recalled, the default assumption being they were recalled to a service dealership instead of an OTA update at home.

The oil lobbyists and Tesla haters absolutely don't want the phrase 'software' in any of the media headlines or HN titles relating to Tesla software recalls and vehemently argued against it. The media grants their wishes.

It's hardly surprising that Tesla fans are not demanding that the word recall not be used for this car hardware issue, even they're more rational and less delusional about car recall phrasing than Tesla haters who seem to be agenda driven to create negative perception about Tesla, and the media happily accommodates them all the time.

This spin on things is hilarious. It wasn’t the “Tesla haters” screaming “don’t mention our precious software! It’s just a recall!”, it was the Tesla fans. “How can it be a recall if it can be fixed without my car going anywhere? The media just wants to make Tesla look bad! This isn’t a recall because Tesla can update it OTA, something the dinosaurs can’t!”

(Which ignores that while Tesla can update more than most other manufacturers, my car gets regular OTA updates too.)

Meanwhile Lincoln sent me a “fix” for a recall that involved neither software or my car moving an inch.

“We identified an issue in your vehicles user guide that could lead to improper seat operation. Please place this piece of paper between pages 168 and 169 of your guide.”

That was a recall, too.

What kind of updates have you received? New maps? Or do you have to pay for those

Lots of continual updates, some release notes aggregated at third party sites like this: https://www.notateslaapp.com/software-updates/

Those are Tesla updates. They were asking about non-Tesla OTA updates, for the Lincoln cars I think.

On my Audi? MMI updates being an easy one, who cares, but updates to the HUD, to the digital cluster.

This was the article headline from NYPost(yay oil lobby funding anti-EV right wing media posted on HN):

"Latest recall at Elon Musk’s Tesla affecting 2.2M vehicles over warning lights"

The recall over "warning lights" turned out be a font size increase in the UI on the screen. I guess it's a light because pixels glow.

This was CNN's headline:

"Tesla recalls nearly all 2 million of its vehicles on US roads"

CNN doesn't like Tesla as well.

Do you think NYPost or the CNN shouldn't have added 'software' in the headline, perhaps before the word recall?

Why or why not?

Not even saying it should be 'over-the-air software recall'.

It can't be a space issue, NYPost found the space to add "Elon Musk" to the headline to fuel extra negativity and the CNN's headline is short.

> yay oil lobby funding anti-EV right wing media posted on HN

But we must blame the left whenever the right eats itself!

Or maybe we live in a multipolar world?

....nah

The oil lobby pays the right wing, Musk does not. So they demonize Tesla and EVs and the left has joined them since a few years, to my disgust.

I used to be a die hard liberal, I only lately realized that liberal media and many liberals don't care two hoots about climate change. I used to defend them all the time. They've been publishing hit pieces and even fake news about Tesla just because they don't like Musk. They lost the moral high ground about fake news. Those are heavily upvoted on liberal social media like HN and Reddit. I don't like what Musk has been doing lately but I do care about the environment and don't hate Tesla and SpaceX like people on here. I was going to buy an EV even at a price premium but now I don't care. I'll buy a gas guzzler like the rest.

I am too old for climate change to affect me and it turns out the young ones don't care enough about it themselves. I used to be very liberal but seeing how Tesla is maligned on HN and Reddit changed me. I don't think I will vote red but I will never vote blue from now on. And then more liberals will wonder why the vote is so close come November.

> I used to be a die hard liberal

I have such skepticism on these things. I don't think you alter your fundamental world view on things like human rights, the environment and such because of "liberal media".

I think exposure to viewpoints that either validate your biases or contradict your worldview strengthen your position, and rarely change it.

In short, I am always skeptical about "I used to be a liberal, but..." (and for clarity, "I used to be conservative, but...") - it's almost exclusively a weird argument to authority. "I know, I understand, I got you. But I saw the light." No, you were probably always conservative, deep down.

This can also differ if you're talking exclusively the political parties, who generally fall under "all suck" in my view.

> I don't think you alter your fundamental world view on things like human rights, the environment and such because of "liberal media"

I haven't, it's part of the reason I said I probably won't vote right.

> In short, I am always skeptical about "I used to be a liberal, but..."

I guess I could link you to my past social media where I used to argue with conservatives over fake news on the right etc.

I can't stand fake news. So then when I saw fake news against Tesla in prestigious media it changed something in me to see liberal hypocrisy. And no, I didn't turn into a conservative.

Electric cars are cool and all but they really aren't that big a deal in terms of the environment. The environmentalists I know hate personalized transportation, full stop. Tesla wants to pave the earth just like any other car company out there. Liberal hypocrisy my ass.

There is a straw man that you have concocted that says that "Tesla haters" (and I will own my bias here, despite being the target audience[1] for Tesla, I am a fan neither of the vehicles or the CEO) who are in the software industry are pressing for these recalls to be called out as recalls and not "just a software update".

Some of these are "recalls that can be fixed with software, often OTA". They're still recalls, no matter how you spin it. Because they affect safety. Maybe in a minor way, in an edge case, in some cases, but nonetheless, despite your sarcastic pouting of "I guess it's a light because pixels glow".

Just like it's a recall when Lincoln says "insert this page into your owner's handbook", or Toyota says "affix this sticker at the bottom of p 232".

> Do you think NYPost or the CNN shouldn't have added 'software' in the headline, perhaps before the word recall?

I, personally could not care less whether the word software appears or does not appear in the headline. I care that it's called a recall. I'm sorry that that hurts some Tesla fans feelings in that they think it makes things sound less safer. OTA updates for safety issues were still a safety issue. And I have zero sympathy when I listen, as I have here on HN, to same fans insisting that its a conspiracy to insist on it, while pretzeling themselves into saying that my user manual examples are still recalls "because I still had to do something about them, while their issue was fixed in their sleep".

Sorry. No. If placing a sticker in an owner's manual is a safety recall, so is your OTA update.

[1] liberal, environmentally conscious, heavy tech fascination gadget geek who likes adrenaline and acceleration.

> environmentally conscious

Yet doing everything to spread FUD about the car company that did and is doing the most for the environment., because Musk... bad. Bollocks. I agree Musk isn't great since Covid, but I was not going to burn the environment over it like all the liberal media and liberal folks like you.

If people who supposedly care about the environment don't care two shits about the most popular EV that can make many people get into EVs, I don't care about spending my hard earned money to pay extra for an EV, since it won't matter anyway and it's a group effort which is failing.

> Meanwhile Lincoln sent me a “fix” for a recall that involved neither software or my car moving an inch.

> “We identified an issue in your vehicles user guide that could lead to improper seat operation. Please place this piece of paper between pages 168 and 169 of your guide.”

Great and perfect example, thanks for bringing that up.

I searched for that issue and every single news article I could find [1] had "missing owner's manual information" or the equivalent right in the headline.

Only Ford or Lincoln haters would argue that removing that information in the headline is a fair and acceptable thing to do.

Are you still going to argue that Tesla is treated the same as Lincoln by the media and on HN? Is hoping for more context in the headlines a bad and unreasonable thing?

[1]

https://www.motor1.com/news/672511/ford-recalls-trucks-suvs-...

https://www.kiro7.com/news/trending/recall-alert-nearly-1-mi...

https://www.ksstradio.com/2023/06/ford-recalls-nearly-one-mi...

https://www.auto123.com/en/news/ford-recall-million-vehicles...

https://www.autoevolution.com/news/ford-recalls-1-million-tr...

https://fordauthority.com/2023/06/1-million-ford-vehicles-re...

https://www.wftv.com/news/trending/recall-alert-nearly-1-mil...

https://dallasexpress.com/business-markets/ford-recall-over-...

> Only Ford or Lincoln haters

Your mistake here is assuming that people are comprised of "haters" and others.

I couldn't care less about Lincoln. I own a Navigator. My partner drives it 99% of the time. It was just the first example that came to mind.

I think Tesla's are overrated for their price - the Model S has (I haven't been in one in 18 months, to be clear) luxury euro pricing for a build quality that is in many cases worse than an econobox Hyundai or Mazda. I lean on the dash in my Audi and it doesn't bow or flex or creak or make me worried that some plastic is about to break. It did in the S. My butt fell asleep after a few hours in a Tesla passenger seat. "Do not use a car wash if the vehicle will be in direct sunlight". Windshields not glued on, at all. Entire brakes missing. Different tires on all four wheels. These aren't teething issues, Tesla is more than two decades old at this point. And doubly so when your CEO gives interviews that have him saying with a straight face, "At this point, I know more about manufacturing than any person living on the planet."

You're just cherrypicking things, not to mention all cars have issues but only Tesla issues get magnified, so you think Tesla is worse. Propaganda works, that's why the liberals are doing what they're doing, spreading FUD about Tesla, and joining the oil lobby in it's crusade against EVs. That's why I don't consider myself a liberal anymore.

E.g. A brand new CRV has issues https://www.reddit.com/r/Honda/comments/11ch594/brand_new_ho...

If that was Tesla it would be a news story because all media hates Tesla.

A recall is a recall. It might be convenient for the customer that the problem can be fixed via software, but it's ultimately irrelevant with respect to the fact that a safety related issue needed to be corrected.

Ultimately irrelevant things are added to headlines all the time, like all the stories about the Lincoln recall in this comment.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40089379

See how they don't just say it's a recall and remove context like it's done with Tesla?

Why are the media and some people so against including similar context for an OTA software when it comes to Tesla?

When I do a simple search for ‘Tesla recall’ in my favorite search engine I get a bunch of results for the recent Tesla recalls. Many of the headlines call out the reasons, I see no persecution of Tesla in the way you describe. There is an easy way for Tesla to avoid all of this though, and it’s to design their vehicles better in the first place.

Looks like the media cares about facts and the fact is, Tesla has had _another_ recall. Tesla is slipping and there seems to be some who are more sensitive to that being discussed than others.

> Looks like the media cares about facts

You made me spit out my coffee. The media literally made up fake news about the Tesla strike in Sweden. This is coming from someone who argued for year up until covid that fake news was exclusive to the right wing. It sad to see liberals and liberal media slip so much

To be fair, software recalls are just a scam by big post office. /s

(more seriously, software updates trigger a required mailed notification, even if the work has already been done. physical recalls do not trigger the same requirement)

What you just typed might just say more about yourself than the people you aim to put down.

Disagree. Sounds like you acknowledge other recalls get reported, but those other recalls aren’t going to hit hacker news, Reddit, and other more mainstream places. Like I bet this will be on most social media platforms.

The amount of attention "the media" gives a company is correlated to the number of shit posts per day the CEO makes on Twitter.

These numbers are pretty meaningless without more context, Ford manufactures ~3x more vehicles per year than Tesla

Number of models would also be relevant.

"Models" is a marketing distinction, which is subject to fudging. For instance Ford lumps their F-150 / F-250 / F-350 models together, calling them all "F Series."

Many other manufacturers would have classified them as separate models sharing a platform, but that decision shouldn't influence the recall performance.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law

Also not all recalls are created equal. I have a VW that was recalled a few years ago for this:

https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/rcl/2019/RIONL-19V615-0655.pdf

> If the build-up happens, it may be possible to remove the key from the ignition switch without the shift lever being in the “P” park position because the system is unable to recognize that the vehicle is not in “P” park

That's obviously not a good thing and I'm glad it was caught, but it's not quite as dangerous to the public as a 7000lb truck's accelerator getting stuck or a car catching on fire when it gets rear-ended.

That's not to say those other automakers haven't had recent recalls just as bad as the Cybertruck's -- I have no idea.

I had a vehicle recalled because it was missing a single sentence in the owners manual. It was resolved my mailing me a sticker with the sentence on it, and instructions on where it should be applied in the manual.

I'm intensely curious: what was the sentence and did you actually do it?

I would've.

I forget what it was, some statement about a safety system or something. I put the sticker in there.

Um, all of these manufacturers make more varieties of models and have sold, cumulatively, a lot more cars than Tesla. This means more opportunity for recall.

You need to normalize by total sales over the past ten years.

Tesla also has a monopoly on the service of their cars, so they can hide recalls. Most Tesla recalls only started to occur during the Biden administration, as regulatory bodies became less impotent.

A company with a good QA (that doesn't stop at the vendor's gate) and putting safety above all will have more recalls.

This is the wrong metric to compare.

First, I agree it's important to put Tesla recalls in context with the greater automotive industry, so I think what you posted is great info. The only thing I'd disagree with is that the numbers compared to Tesla, and relative media coverage, is surprising. It seems expected to me.

Tesla bills itself not as an automaker, but a tech company. So, it makes sense they'd have a larger media footprint, which covers not just the automotive industry, but the tech industry media as well. This isn't unfair, considering they get the benefit of a tech-based market cap to go with it [1].

They also put themselves in headlines more often than other car companies with outlandish claims such as Musk saying, "At this point, I think I know more about manufacturing than anyone currently alive on earth." [2] When Musk and the company put themselves in headlines so often, it makes sense that the media would cover them more. This is likely a direct result of their advertising strategy, to create buzz [3], so I think media coverage of failures is a direct result.

You could argue that's Musk, not the company, but they made the strategic decision that Musk is their PR function when they became the only car company to dissolve their PR department in 2020 [4].

One last thing I noticed was that the source of the recall data comes from the NHTSA [5], and they don't seem to distinguish recalls between different brands owned by the same company (for example, Ford's recalls seem like they would include both Ford and Lincoln, GM includes Chevrolet, GMC, etc.) Tesla's 20 recalls in 2022 cover I believe the four models they made in 2022, while Ford's 67 recalls are across the 39 models under the Ford brand and five models under Lincoln (I counted these by looking at the drop-down selectors on KBB's value estimator [6]).

In short, Tesla exploits the hype machine; is it surprising that their recalls are hyped as well?

[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/tesla-...

[2] https://www.thestreet.com/markets/elon-musk-ted-talk

[3] https://fourweekmba.com/tesla-marketing-strategy/

[4] https://electrek.co/2020/10/06/tesla-dissolves-pr-department...

[5] https://datahub.transportation.gov/Automobiles/NHTSA-Recalls...

[6] https://www.kbb.com/car-prices/

The Ford one was the worst - we had cases of people cars burning out and one person died.

It was due to the Kuga 1.4 Ecoboost 4 cylinder - there were a design defect that caused cracks that caused fuel to leak onto a hot cylinder head and then your car broke into flames.

Thanks to social media pressure think Ford bought back all models or offered generous trade in values - the resale value of the 1.4 Ecoboost tanked in our markets.

Ford discontinued the 1.4 Ecoboost completely.

In the UK, lots of people are finding their 1.0 Ecoboost engines are catastrophically failing at 50,000 miles or less (hence the nickname Ecoboom). Ford have been useless. This has been going on for years now, and they have finally said they'll help, but only if the repair was done at the dealer, you have a FSH and the car is less than 7 years old. Outside of that you're SOL. They've refused to recall and fix the underlying issue. Obviously this tanks their resale value but Ford do not care.

Probably because these other manufacturers have more than 4-5 models.

I am not knowledgeable about cars so please correct me if I'm mistaken but surely that number isn't useful unless we also have the number of models and vintages are in service? I would think Ford have way more models in play than Tesla for example, and additionally brands with a long history would have multiple years of models. I mean BMW and Ford have been building cars since before WWI and have a very wide range so there are probably at least 10 or 20 years of models that might conceivably have a recall. It's not fair to compare them directly I would think.

A major reason they don't make the news is that many aren't that critical.

The most serious recall I had was for an electric harness that could catch fire (or cause a fire?), one of the least serious was a light (not a headlight or taillight, a light in the door that illuminated the ground and lower part of the vehicle when you opened it) would just stop working.

The former may have made the news, I don't know, the latter had no reason to. I've even had a couple (specifics forgotten) that were entirely aesthetic (interior, not exterior like issues with paint peeling, that was on a car from the 90s).

Right, but do you feel tesla changing icon sizes was critical?

Information impacting safety features is critical. Either the font was complaint with the specs or it was not.

Haha yes and the world is black and white

> A major reason they don't make the news is that many aren't that critical.

My favorite recall was the letter I got last year for 23V048000.

The instructions for how to engage the defroster in my car manual were suboptimal. You actually _don't_ want it to be on full-blast.

Please report to your nearest Nissan dealer to get a piece of paper to put in your car manual.

My Ford truck currently has a recall with an unknown fix. Axle bolts can sheer off, leaving only the rotors and caliper mount to keep the wheels on the car.

But, you're right, most of these recalls are not "instant death machine you can't stop". While a fire can be dangerous, you will have time to react to that one.

True, but in the case of the one I had (and I forgot to mention) it was a fire when the vehicle was off. Definitely an urgent problem since this meant it could happen when no one was around.

I work in automotive and have had to handle the procedures after a recall was decided against code I owned (though had not written). The important distinction here is in how many vehicles are affected by the recall and the severity of it. Also, potentially in the party at fault (Takata vs every single OEM, for example). The thing to note here is that Tesla had to recall every single Tesla with FSD or Autopilot because NHTSA demanded it, over Tesla's express wishes. That is much worse than pretty much any other recall.

The other component to this is that many of those other recalls are probably software/calibration recalls, with no parts touched, and Tesla has been doing OTA updates for years longer than the other OEMs. In some ways that's good, since they can fix things without the need to issue a full recall and get the fix out to customers much faster. In some ways that's really really really bad because they push fixes to a range of hardware with limited customer ability to opt out, and I have zero reason to believe that they're managing the complexity/testing problem on that orders of magnitude better than the rest of the OEMs, since I sat through a lot of meetings trying to come up with a way to really thoroughly handle it to no avail. I distrust that kind of operation immensely and it's probably the primary reason I won't own a Tesla and have little interest in anything being produced today. Maybe a Mazda, maybe.

That said, I spent 5 years at Ford and I can't say I'm at all surprised that they lead this list...

Doesn't mean much without a breakdown of volume & model year.

And you also need to see percent of production. Of course Ford is going to have more trucks recalled than Tesla. Tesla has only put a few thousand on the road (trucks ie cybertruck, not cars).

Here we go. The inevitable post in every single thread about a Tesla recall. We get it, other manufacturers have recalls too. We get it, other manufacturers' recalls don't get as much news coverage or HN discussion. Please. No one cares.

One of the most frightening moments of my early life was when the accelerator peddle got stuck (actually one of the connecting rods) going into a roundabout, fairly recently after passing my driving test.

I couldn't figure out why I was speeding up even when breaking hard. But somehow I managed to maintain control and put the gear into neutral - and then sat at the edge of the roundabout with the engine screaming at full throttle before I figured out what was wrong and turned off the ignition. Wouldn't want to be in a Cybertruck with that happening.

You would want to be in a Cybertruck, when you press the brake pedal it auto overrides the accelerator pedal. Being in a Cybertruck with a stuck accel pedal is way safer than in a traditional truck

Except it's all fly by wire so you're relying on the software to be bug free and I'd honestly rather trust physics.

There is no "physics", unless you're relying on falling fast without a parachute or something like that.

In this case you're relying on mechanics to be bug free as opposed to software. To imply that any car is designed and built in such a way that it can only fail if physics itself fails is rather arrogant. There are comments here in the thread pointing to the long lists of bugs with non-drive-by-wire cars.

Mechanics may well be easier to design correctly and test, sure. But get out with "physics".

> To imply that any car is designed and built in such a way that it can only fail if physics itself fails is rather arrogant

You're putting words in my mouth. All I'm saying is that direct physical connections between things are much more reliable and straightforward than software connections between things. Of course no system is perfect.

Source?

This very case itself, of the accelerator pedal coming loose and jamming, was in fact a mechanical problem.

Other comments above have more examples of stuck accelerator wires and more.

Mechanics wear and tear and allow for human override and human error, software introduces complexity. Both have their own set of issues, neither are perfect, one can’t say either of them is inherently more reliable.

There is not a direct physical connection between the brake pedal and the brakes, or the acceleration pedal and the... not even sure what this would be. The n admission valves on the cylinders? Unless you consider "direct" as "passing through 5-50 different parts that each has an effect on the next in the chain", which is the definition of indirect. I'm not putting words in your mouth, I'm pointing out you're using the wrong words.

You're neither relying on "physics", which would mean a failure of the system would be caused by a failure of "physics", meaning something like the Maxwell's ecuations turn out to be wrong, nor on "direct connection", unless the brake pedal is directly pushing on the brake rotor, which is obviously false.

Of course there's no problem with saying you'd rather rely on mechanics or hydraulics than electronics or software. Though, to use words your way, tesla is not relying on "software", but on "math".

Fly by wire throttles have been commonplace in cars since the early-to-mid 00s.

I was more referring to its power and size, you need to figure out that your still accelerating when you've released pressure on the accelerator and you need to switch pedals to break.

Where are you going to be after half a second of maximum acceleration in a 6600lb cybertruck?

0-60 time is 2.6 seconds, or 10.32m/s^2 if it’s evenly distributed. So from zero you’d be doing 11.5mph in 0.5s (and travelled a little over four feet).

But importantly, it looks like this is more of a ratchet effect… so if your pedal is stuck at 100%, it’s because you pressed it that far (even if intending it to be momentary). That’s not something you’d normally do in a parking lot full of nuns, you’re probably on a highway with some time to react and press the brake. My guess is that’s why we haven’t seen a tragic accident out of this.

Yeah except it has a 0-60mph time of 2.6 seconds. You're probably already travelling at at least 20 so you have 1-2 seconds to figure out what's going on before you crash. Good luck.

Until the brake pedal falls off as well

Stopping is better than unavoidable runaway acceleration

> Being in a Cybertruck with a stuck accel pedal is way safer than in a traditional truck

I'd bet there isn't a current truck on the market that doesn't cut the throttle when you hit the brake. Basically all cars now.

Traditional automakers have been programming their vehicles to work exactly the same way for a decade+, ever since the Toyota stuck accelerator debacle. My last two cars both ignored throttle input when the brake was depressed.

What car was this in? I was always told that the brake of a modern car is much stronger than the engine so you can always come to a stop, even with a stuck accelerator

While the breaks physically will be ABLE to overcome the engine in anything that isn't a dodge hellcat, if the peddle is stuck to the floor and the engine is at full throttle, you won't have much or any vacuum boosting effects! You will have to quite literally STAND on the brake peddle like the bad old days, and a lot of people driving today have never experienced unassisted braking.

In most modern cars, there is a pressure booster in the power brake system, enabling braking force that can overcome the engine’s horsepower and quickly stop the car. But they are designed to continually maintain the braking force for a limited amount of time—30 seconds or so—after which this boosting ability is depleted. Once that happens, braking must be fully supplied by muscle power via the mechanical backup.

This is challenging if the engine is stuck in a wide open throttle (WOT) state, because the driver must overcome the cars weight in addition to the engine.

For a small car like a Toyota Corolla, this requires a few hundred pounds of downforce on the pedal. For a large 300hp SUV, this could require a thousand pounds of downforce.

As you said, the brakes can bring the car to a stop, but the car will start reaccelerating if the engine isn’t shut off.

(Sorry for mixing physical units.)

While it is the case, by design and typically by regulation, that brakes have more braking force on paper than the engine and drivetrain can produce, in the real world it is not so straightforward.

ICE engines have active heat rejection and conventional brakes don't. So ultimately in any prolonged fight between an engine and brakes the engine will win.

Hot brakes have a lower coefficient of friction. This is the brake "fade" experienced on long downhill runs or heavy use, such as while towing heavy loads. In extreme cases brake pad outgassing, brake pad glazing and boiling brake fluid, all a consequence of heat, will degrade brake power.

Traditionally vacuum assist is used to amplify brake force in passenger cars. The vacuum reserve is, however, finite and little vacuum is available from an engine with a stuck open throttle. When the throttle is even partially open and the engine RPM is kept low (such as when fighting it with the brakes) the vacuum drops severely. When boost runs out brake force is greatly reduced. This all changes in heavier vehicles where more robust systems are employed, such as compressed air brakes with large pressure reserves.

Some vehicles have enough power to overcome the brakes on driven wheels. Some vehicles have "low range" gearing that can also easily overcome the brakes.

The situation described by helsinkiandrew was probably a combination of brake fade that emerged while fighting the engine and lack of brake boost due to low vacuum because the throttle was somehow stuck. But there isn't enough information to say for certain.

FWIW, even if the accelerator pedal is stuck or misread in the Cybertruck, the brake pedal immediately overrides any input from it and stops accelerating.

So I’m going to wildly speculate here:

I’m guessing most CTs have sold to big Tesla fans who already had Teslas. I’m going to assume those kind of fans also like one-pedal driving (many people do).

So if you’ve been using one-pedal for years you’re used to releasing the accelerator stopping you.

Could the driver who hit a pole have stopped themselves with the brake? Yes. If they were used to one-pedal for years, would they have thought of that? In a split-second panic scenario perhaps not.

I know millions of people love one-pedal and many (most?) electric cars have done version of it. But I wonder if stuff like this has been studied. How well to people used to it handle using the brake in a panic if they don’t often drive two pedal mode/cars?

I’d love to know the results of such a study.

If one was aware what was happening, they would be able to stop/Slow but lifting the brake would immediately cause the car to accelerate . This would be instantaneous acceleration enough to cause damage before you could hit the brakes at which it would stop.

Single pedal driving still requires me to use the brake pedal often.

In reality, there might be a 3-5x reduction to brake pedal usage. That still means on any given trip, every 5th stop sign/red light will require break pedal usage.

If anything the single pedal driving causes me to let off of the accelerator earlier than I normally would in an ICE car, and therefore I have more time to react with the break pedal if needed.

I doubt I'm unique in these things.

I rarely hit the brake pedal in my car at all with one pedal driving. In fact I'd say 80% of drives I don't hit it at all, and the rest i might use it once or twice. I'm sure I'd still hit the brake in an emergency since it's so ingrained in me from driving normal cars for so long, but I'm not sure how long that will be true for, especially for new younger drivers that have really only driven EVs.

That’s a good point too. Maybe it’s not much of an issue for us “older” drivers but as we start to get “native” one-pedal drivers it could start to be.

That's surprising. I've definitely driven 100s of miles without ever hitting the brake peddle.

Stuck throttles used to be quite a common problem in the pre-ECU days.

I've had two cars that had a stuck throttle in the past, both where the accelerator cable connects to the throttle body on the top of the engine. In both cases, lubing it up solved the problem and it never reoccurred. It is a bit of a shocking thing to happen, but with a manual it's instinctive to just jam the clutch down.

What worries me about modern cars, in particular electrics, is the lack of any kind of kill-switch. Motorbikes have them, cars used to just have an ignition switch, but now everything from the ignition to the accelerator pedals is electric. Wouldn't it be a good idea to have a switch that kills the car if all else fails?

Shifting the car into neutral is your best bet, as well as a pumped parking/emergency brakes. However, I will always believe that turning secondary brakes into a button/lever was a bad idea.

In some cars the transmission is also controlled electrically.

Don't buy a car that can't manually go into neutral. Ever.

In cyber trucks shifting to neutral requires a tap and a gesture on the touch screen. It’s a really great and safe idea.

Putting shifting controls on the screen was dumb for many reasons, but doesn't really cause a problem in this case - the cybertruck will disable the accelerator when you hit the brakes, accomplishing the same thing as putting it into neutral.

The most interesting part of this news is that it gives is the exact number of Cybertrucks sold so far. It is under 4000.

Are all 4000 of those even delivered?

Last I checked they were basically bespoke at this point.

Are these all 100k$ above

Yes, all foundation series at >$100k.

This is surprising to me too because I saw 3 different Cybertrucks on the road yesterday. I guess I live in a hot zone.

thats the number produced, which is the bottleneck

Will there be a recall for a car wash being able to destroy the cybertruck? [1]

[1] https://twitter.com/StonkKing4/status/1780306557538050532

If this problem is real and serious, meaning the damage is expensive to repair, this could destroy Tesla’s reputation and valuation.

Supposedly it broke the entire truck and they voided his warranty. [1]

[1] https://twitter.com/StonkKing4/status/1780303955811278884

Jesus... "Do not wash in direct sunlight"

Didn’t listen to the blind old Chinese man that sold it to him I guess.

That’s pretty standard advice for washing any car. A lot of the chemicals in the soaps and polishes and waxes you use you don’t want drying on the surface of your paint, or at least not in the quantities you apply it in. But if you’re washing in direct sunlight, there’s a high chance the water will evaporate and leave dried residues before you get to rinsing / buffing it away.

Yep, just standard detailer wisdom. Washing in direct sunlight requires extra care, especially when using chemicals that aren't ph-neutral.

This... actually makes sense. But I think the stakes are higher with brushed steel. And when it comes to lampooning bad decisions in car design, Cybertruck is in good company with DeLorean which had similar issues and enjoyed a similar comedic reception.

There are a few DeLoreans in my area. They look really nice. I've owned one before, the finish was a little finnicky and very fingerprint prone, but ultimately held up better than painted finishes from the era. The plastics on them tended to degrade pretty badly, though.

For a truck, stainless might turn out to be a pretty good choice. Fingerprints will always be problematic, though.

> For a truck, stainless might turn out to be a pretty good choice. Fingerprints will always be problematic, though.

I dunno, I've never been much of a gearhead but the few times I've owned a truck I didn't really care if there was moss* growing on the damned thing. But those were pickups, and I used them for pickup things. I dunno how to square that with the notion that a truck is ruined by a fingerprint.

* for those of you who don't live in the rainy bits of the pacific northwest, this is not an exaggeration

In US desert states that makes sense. I've never heard of it in NW Europe.

I am glad I canceled my Cybertruck reservation. Getting margin called and a bricked $100k tin can at the same time would probably be too much. Now about that margin call, I have to deal with…

I love how they prioritized gimmicks like bullet proof doors and "bioweapon defense mode" but simply driving through a carwash can fuck your car.

Bullets: no worries

Squirt gun: oh shit, hide the jewels!

Weirdest goddamn timeline

That's because it was built by amateurs. Auto industry pros would never make this mistake.

I can imagine someone being in a rush and forgetting to put on Car Wash mode. 100k down is a rough way to go.

Seems like detecting "hey, I'm in a car wash..." would be substantially easier for AI than full self-driving.

It is! It always was! But how does the AI decide when to launch the car wash detector app?

Why link to that guy instead of the original source? https://www.tiktok.com/@captian.ad/video/7358236474321505578

There was never a claim made of a denied warranty.

> Why link to that guy instead of the original source?

1. Its what google showed

2. TikTokphobia on HN

-phobia implies irrational fear, while any hate for TikTok is very much warranted. ;)

Did you visit tiktok and watch the video?

I get that, but the twitter post completely mischaracterized the issue.

This is a good explainer video: https://twitter.com/garageklub/status/1779571445930324456

interesting. fortunately seems like a simple fix.

Friction fit handlebar grips for mountain bikes, cruisers and kids bikes have a similar installation problem. Bike mechanics use hairspray to solve it.

Slick when initially sprayed, tacky when dry. Also the solvent in more hairspray can be used to subsequently remove them.

I've always prefered spit and yelling... so this is a good tip

Mountain bikes tend to be ridden wet, so soap is a big no no.

But yes, saliva if you can’t figure out where the can of AquaNet went.

The air compressor trick works great. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6SsqBcpXZU

Nothing bad happened here and they caught an issue without any incident or injury. I wonder if there will ever be a day where Hackernews isn't actively rooting for the downfall of innovative technology companies

Tesla is no longer a leader in innovation, their vehicles couldn’t even do V2L/V2G until the CyberTruck.

48v is a pretty big leap forward that I bet other automakers will replicate. So is assembling the interior (seats, console, etc.) onto the battery and lifting it into the vehicle. Also, the rigid wire harness that can be snapped in by robotic arms. The list goes on. I recommend watching some of the teardown videos.

Munro is transparently biased at this point.

So don't listen to them, listen to Caresoft, their competitor in teardown and benchmarking:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oRRDEVpCHPI

Don't even know how to respond to this lol. Their EV's are head and shoulders above the competition

Don’t even know how to respond to this because no facts were presented.

In some ways, Tesla gets too much credit for innovation. Their cars aren't the cheapest, their charging curves aren't the fastest, and their range isn't the highest.

But the balance of all three attributes often makes them the best choice within their segment.

CT is an exception at the moment. It'd be really hard to pick it over the Silverado EV.

The charging network being open to everyone will mitigate a massive advantage they had in terms of selling cars.

Yes, they are.

It's schadenfreude. I think the Edison Truck guy is also a little bit of a jerk but I prefer how they're planning to do things - just make a hybrid version of a regular truck. You don't have to re invent every little bit of metal and computerize everything and make it into a privacy nightmare just to stick a battery into a vehicle

In fact the Toyota hybrids are quite similar to regular cars. Ground-up rewrites are great resume filler but there are other ways to innovate

Tesla isn't innovative or tech.

At least they've only sold 3800 so far. But what are the odds this is the only thing that will need to be recalled?

First year of New models from any manufacturer will have issues to iron out

Sure but what calibre of issues should you expect? Surely not faulty pedals causing the vehicle to accelerate.

Toyota's wheels have been literally falling off their cars.

https://www.cnn.com/2022/06/24/cars/toyota-bz4x-tundra-recal...

What is their reputation on reliability on here? How many decades have they been making cars compared and how mature is their manufacturing process?

You just don't hear about other carmakers' recalls on here, so everyone makes those assumptions you just did, that Tesla is disproportionately bad with quality issues..

Disproportionately? Does Tesla ship as many vehicles as Toyota? You have made me curious about the numbers you are using.

Tesla doesn't even register in the top 10 most recalls per car company in 2023.

https://i.imgur.com/bygtzk2.png

What data are you using?

How many of Ford Motor's 58 recalls in 2023 made HN's front page?

Meanwhile Tesla updates the car UIs icon sizes via a software update, and there are headlines all over the media including HN stating that Tesla recalled millions of cars, omitting that it was a software update.

That makes people like the GP think Teslas have disproportionately worse issues, which appears to be the objective.

> What data are you using?

I’m not the one claiming anything about proportions. I didn’t claim to have any data. How did you arrive at your proportions?

I had linked it in the very comment you replied to...please reread.

I see only a link to an infographic about recalls in 2023.

How is recalls per company a valid metric? Should it be at least normalised by number of models (e.g. if we assume design flaws)?

By that metric Fords 58 are normalised by 40 odd models (only counting current) while Teslas 20 are normalised by 6 models (counting any car/truck build).

Why would number of recalls be proportional to number of vehicles shipped? I think number of recalls would be more proportional to number of car models available. And number of vehicles recalled would be proportional to number of vehicles shipped. In this case 3,878 vehicles were recalled.

To me, “disproportionately bad with quality issues” would be about total units shipped.

Total units shipped since the inception of the company?

I think the NHTSA was only formed in 1970.

Which metric are you using when you use the word disproportionately?

Linked it in the other comment that you had replied to.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40086651

That says 2023. I don’t see Toyota mentioned in there at all. Maybe I’m missing something.

Toyota had a recall just a couple of days ago. That story wasn't even submitted to HN, while the Cybertruck already made the front page a couple of times and will probably continue to do so. That's a perfect example of disproportionate coverage leading to several commenters on this story automatically assuming Tesla is worse than other manufacturers. And somehow you didn't ask them for data saying you were curious but immediately jumped on my comment. That's typically not the behavior of someone that's starting with no data and neutral.

I asked about the data you are using when you say it is disproportionate. It sounds like you don’t have any.

As the saying goes, you can take a horse to the water, but you cannot make it drink it. Cannot help those who cannot help themselves.

You did not post any data. You made some assertions about Toyota and Tesla. I asked which data you were using. You linked to an infographic and an article about a recent recall. You seem to have a bias. You should think about that.

Ford recalled 6 million vehicles last year. For some context, they sold around 2 million last year.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2024/01/12/vehicle....

edit: To add, this isn't some one off event. In 2022 Ford recalled 8.6 million vehicles.

At least the wheels falling off slow the car down.

At least you can steer the car with unintentional acceleration, unlike with wheels falling off.

You can steer as long as you've got three wheels. Not as well as with four of course. With a modern brake system, you should have some braking power too. I know someone who lost a wheel on an 1965 truck with a single chamber brake cylinder, so there was no pressure in the system as brake parts fell off with the wheel.

If you press both the accelerator and brake in a Tesla, it slows the car down and shows a message in the instrument cluster that both pedals are pressed: https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/while-breaking-if-yo...

There is no calibre of expected issues. Nobody’s a prophet. Faulty pedals happened in the past with other car manufacturers.

Toyota had the floor mat thing as well, that was big news for awhile.

Literally anything can happen. I never liked the idea of buying a Tesla, but let's be fair.

Some of the 2022 Broncos were literally dropping valves right off the lot, so this feels quite minor.

First year Ford Mustang Mach E: can confirm.

Tesla is losing money on every truck sold at this point. The recall is just another multimillion dollar deficit on the books now.

Whether this product line will be sustainable (or exist) 1 year from now is unlikely.

Lackluster sales. Poor public perception. Truck would likely need another overhaul (more money burned) and another 1-2 year loss leader phase to test the market, and get their build processes updated to scale.

Tesla could have owned the entire EV truck market currently, if they didn't choose to make a truck that required a big amount of R&D and is hard to build. Why Tesla chose such a path completely baffles me.

Tesla's mission was "to accelerate the world's transition to sustainable energy" which they were doing by making solid and affordable EVs and electric storage solutions.

One of the biggest reasons of the success of Model S was because it had a modern but conventional design unlike the other toy-like EV cars on the market at the time. Model S proved that it is possible to build a modern conventional EV car that people can buy.

It feels like Cybertruck is coming from a completely different mission statement. Actually most of the decisions they have been taking for the last 2-3 years feel like it.

I don’t see Elon as a business genius and thus the idiotic decision to go thru with production for this truck is not at all a surprise to me

I don't think your first sentence can hold true as soon as the designs were released. The way to capture EV truck market is to make something that looks like a truck. Cybertruck is ugly as all get out.

I saw a Ford F-150 Lightning the other day, looks practically the same as an ICE F-150.

I've seen rumours here and there (albeit nothing particularly reliable) that the Cybertruck might be a platform used to learn about this design/manufacturing approach. It's hard because it's hard, but the Cybertruck is how they learn how to make it easier.

The thinking being, of course, that if/when they get it nailed, they've potentially got an advantage to leverage over other manufacturers for future cars such as the Model 2.

Only time will tell whether this is the case, and whether it worked.

This is nonsensical, the Cybertruck is a terrible platform that had serious Chassis design issues that any other automaker would have killed the design over, but because Musk's ego is too big, there was never an option to say "we need to go back to the drawing board".

> the Cybertruck is a terrible platform that had serious Chassis design issues

Thanks; I'd be interested in learning more about this, if you have links to share?

Tesla building the Cybertruck is their attempt to get people to buy something specifically because it is "cool", and not because it is "an EV".

If the customer buys it, they switch to an EV platform, thereby accelerating Tesla's mission of "transition[ing] to sustainable energy".

Leading with "it's an EV" is the primary reason why "legacy auto" has been scaling back their EV manufacturing, because people generally don't care about "EV". They do care about something "cool" though.

They should've gotten some second opinions on what makes something "cool" because the Cybertruck is not it.

Reports from YouTubers who own the Cybertruck is that (at this stage) owning one makes you feel like a celebrity. People come to you constantly to take ask questions and take pictures with the CT. So, people seem to disagree with you.

If that's not enough, there's a long list of celebrities that now own cybertrucks, including Kim Kardashian, Lady Gaga, Justin Bieber, Jay Z, Steve Aoki, Pharrell, and more. Might not fit your definition of "cool", but clearly, it does for a lot of people.

Affirming that I have even less in common with the likes of Kim Kardashian and Steve Aoki than previously understood is perhaps the nicest compliment you could have given me. Thank you!

I would encourage you to watch any recent YouTube video produced by any Cybertruck owner. Middle America, who is generally anti-EV, disagrees with you. That is why Tesla is doing this.

Model S, Model 3, Model X and Model Y are also cool cars, and they have the advantages of being EV. And this formula was working with these models, increasing EV adoption massively. Why change a winning formula?

Cybertruck tried to be over the top cool, and sacrificed some basics like time-to-market, easy production, range, safety... And it was a totally unnecessary change of strategy. Cybertruck really didn't need to be stainless steel or low-poly in order to sell. Model Y being one of the best selling cars in the world proves this.

It was working for people who were willing to buy an EV. Those people generally fall into two groups: 1) They specifically want an EV due to $reasons or 2) They are looking for a new car, and are willing to consider an EV. Both of these groups are fine with the current S3XY lineup because they resemble "normal" cars. That's why the Model S originally had so much success - it was a normal car, but electric. Even then, it was still a hard sell in 2013 to early adopters.

I'm going to stereotype a bit here, but Tesla YouTubers/Tweeters/Fanatics and the two groups above aside, everyone else is generally "against" EVs. If you own one, you know exactly what I'm talking about. The Cybertruck is Tesla's attempt to change that. Don't convince them on the green-ness or potential cost-savings of home charging, convince them because it's cool. It's something that no other manufacturer can compete against. (for now)

There was never a snowball's chance in hell that once Ford and GMC got involved in the EV truck market that Tesla would be anything but an afterthought.

> Tesla's mission was "to accelerate the world's transition to sustainable energy" which they were doing by making solid and affordable EVs and electric storage solutions.

Since far before Tesla, selling cars at high profit margins has ultimately been about selling power/attention/sex-appeal, not to advance an objective like "accelerate the world's transition to sustainable energy. That's a nice side effect, but it's not ultimately what sells them. Otherwise, all of the original fan base of Tesla would have bought Nissan Leafs (which preceded Tesla).

Trendsetting companies need hero products that capture (or even set) the zeitgeist.

Teslas older models once played that role, but no longer, since they are so common at this point in their primary target markets.

To recapture customer imagination, the Cybertruck is promoting the "faux survivalism" hero narrative. It's the same narrative that is selling Rivians and F150, but taken to the aesthetic extreme.

> Tesla could have owned the entire EV truck market currently, if they didn't choose to make a truck that required a big amount of R&D and is hard to build. Why Tesla chose such a path completely baffles me.

I often think this, but then I think about how it would have actually happened. Right now, Tesla doesn't have enough domestically produced 2170s to supply both 3 and Y production. The 4680 ramp has been so slow that it is barely ahead of CT production anyway.

I think some of their failures on the battery supply chain side are bleeding over into product failures at this point.

How do you arrive at lackluster sales conclusion? They are obviously just production limited as they scale up a new line. Can you place an order today and buy a cybertruck? No there is still a year+ long wait list of people wanting to buy.

It's literally the meme truck. That meme has sailed and died. People will still hoot and holler when they spot you driving one in the wild but that's different from people wanting to pay the steep sticker price for what the car actually is.

I don't see moms picking up their kids with these trucks. I don't see people using them for camping. The unnamed companion ATV seems to have been recalled for not being roadsafe and doesn't seem to be coming back any time soon.

It's possible there will be a revised Cybertruck eventually but this thing has so many design flaws and underdelivers on so many promises (e.g. "you could use it as a boat" when taking it to the carwash voids your warranty) that it's not mass market compatible. Heck, it's not even possible to make it street legal in Europe without massive changes.

As far as Musk's ventures go, the Cybertruck is up there with the Hyperloop in terms of what it is and what was promised. Remember the unprovoked throwaway claim that it'll let you use it as a source for compressed air to drive pneumatic tools? Or the talk about selling a version of it to the military as an APC?

I’m definitely going to be picking up my kids in this truck and camping, but maybe I’m just a weird tech bro. In the arms race that is American roads, it’s objectively safer for my family to be driven around in a massive steel tank. I also love the look.

> Tesla is losing money on every truck sold at this point

Is it just me or many people don't seem to understand fixed costs vs. variable costs that I learnt about in high school while growing up in the third world?

Don't people have to take Econ 101 in the USA or whatever the equivalent is in their countries? Or is it optional.

Not even going to bring up "advanced" concepts like COGS that I know about while being a CS major and never taking an economics course.

What you said doesn't many sense, because, say they sell 100 million trucks, according to your logic they would end up with a huge loss. But in reality they would make a big profit.

Some companies will literally sell products for less than the cost of the components that go into them.

Sometimes that's a supermarket selling 'loss leaders' to get people into the store where they'll hopefully buy other things - or a games console manufacturer planning to make up the loss because they get paid for every game sold.

Other times a manufacturer wants to hit a promised launch date, and hopes to get manufacturing costs down later. Maybe they haven't had time to set up certain cost-saving automation, or a planned lower-cost component wasn't ready in time for launch. Maybe their widget supplier has promised a lower cost when they're ordering 10,000 a month but right now they're only ordering 500 a month.

Of course, without access to insider information we can only guess if this is really occurring...

> Some companies will literally sell products for less than the cost of the components that go into them.

But that is not what Tesla is doing, is it?

> Of course, without access to insider information we can only guess if this is really occurring...

No need to guess, the GP poster confidently stated this:

> Tesla is losing money on every truck sold at this point.

They must be an insider or have reliable insider information.

Of course, this is the only explanation. No one can just make stuff up on the internet. That’s impossible.

The videos of this issue are telling.

Extremely poor design. With something as simple as a peddle, its almost unfathomable.

A guy posted a video of his accelerator pedal getting stuck in the fully down position to all of the relevant subreddits (r/tesla, etc) and was banned from posting in all of them.

https://twitter.com/elaifresh/status/1779600432085819708?s=4...

These forums are all moderated by Tesla, or is it Elon fanboys who refuse to accept any criticism?

It's a cult, worst than peak Steve Jobs distortion field era for those that lived through both. I say this as an Apple user and former Tesla driver..

Tesla private investors is my guess.

Here is a message they use to spam regularly on the main r/teslamotors subreddit:

> To the critics, we ask you to remember that many people in this sub not only believe in what Tesla is doing, but have voted with their money.

https://old.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/wiki/automoderator-sche...

Apparently the brake overrides the accelerator, so if you keep your calm, you can come to a stop.

Tesla Cybertruck: "if you keep your calm, you can stop"

Yes, this is the case on every production vehicle. People don't always realize it, though, and fail to push the brake all the way and hold it.

That's not quite the same. In Tesla hitting the brakes kills power to the motor. In an ICE car this is not the case, and if the engine is running away it can bleed off vacuum and you lose your brake assist. So if someone panics and starts pumping the brake pedal they end up in a runaway acceleration scenario until they remember that neutral exists.

In the real world runaway acceleration cases are extremely rare and always involve a degree of operator error, but they make for exciting headlines so people get the wrong idea about how common they are.

"until they remember that neutral exists." Or they can just turn the ignition off. When I was 16 and took driving school, we did this as an exercise. The instructor just simply reached over and turned the key and I had to walk through starting it again (I can't remember if we pulled over or not). I wonder what would happen to a push button start car if you just pushed it while in motion?

I think you may have to hold it down to force it to stop, but this isn't something that I've tried.

I accidentally hit my Start/Stop button yesterday instead of Park when parking yesterday (very slow speed, buttons are close together). It was quite rough and through my parking break on.

Google tells me that "Keyless ignition-equipped cars moving at higher speeds will generally keep moving even if you accidentally press the push to start button. However, if you hold the push to start button down, you can turn off the engine even when the car's moving at moderate speeds"

> In an ICE car this is not the case

That hasn't been true for a number of years. Almost all ICE cars on sale today will cut the throttle if you hit the brake.

> In an ICE car this is not the case, and if the engine is running away it can bleed off vacuum and you lose your brake assist

In an older car, yes. Current cars in the US are all fly-by-wire throttle, and programmed to close the throttle if you apply the brake. And when the throttle is closed, vacuum is restored, and you will have full brake power. All major automakers started doing this did this after the 2009 Toyota "sudden acceleration" debacle.

Very few people can keep their calm in an unexpected situation. Even people who are trained and supposedly prepared for stressful situations often panic.

Unapproved lubricant... well. Exactly the same, and also in throttle control input, caused (albeit together with software having problems handling the issue) a total control loss in Airbus A320, during a training flight in 2018 in Estonia. It resulted in a crash landing - they barely landed the plane in a way in which they could walk away from the landing, and the plane got destroyed.

Incident report: https://www.flightradar24.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2019/1...

Also Mentour Pilot did a pretty good video explaining all causes, including the software issues: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04M63B1sv_Y

I second the video recommendation, mentor makes some of the better documentary style content on the app. the fact that it’s completely free makes it even crazier!

Yeah I like his content too, but I'm far from revering him this way (and I see a lot of comments like yours). By the way I also respect how good he is at monetizing this, however... Internet both as a technology and even more as a community was founded by scientists whom were a bit later joined by (also often same people were doing both) people doing and creating things non-commercially, as a hobby, because they simply enjoy them, and so on (I'm speaking mostly of Usenet newsgroups in the latter part, as the early form of that). I don't see how (consensually) sharing content for free is "crazy". That's just the way, the Internet way. Maybe it's just the demographic cohort of enjoyers of his content largely overlaps with the cohort of customers of commercial video streaming platforms which creates a feeling like that.

Worrisome, but good that it got caught before anyone got into an accident. The issue shouldn't be present in all trucks, but better to recall all of them to be safe.

BTW: What happens if you fully press both the acceleration and brake pedals? I would hope for the brakes to be more powerful and stop the car, is that the case?

Since the accelerator is drive by wire, pushing both pedals disables the accelerator, and produces a warning chime and alert message on the screen.

The brakes do not have to be stronger, it’s handled in software.

If the accelerator is pinned down, letting up on the brake will cause the car to start accelerating again. So you have to keep on the brake and then put the car in park. Pressing the accelerator while in park does nothing.

> pushing both pedals disables the accelerator

Much to the frustration of those of us who occasionally engage in some left-foot braking. (Though TBH in my experience it's usually more effective in FWD cars.)

What is the point of heel-toe or left foot braking if there is no gearbox to rev match?

I like the left-foot jab jab jab to induce a slide while still on the power. I've read about other mixed input strategies, but that was the only one I was ever able to pull off to my satisfaction.

I don't know about the Cybertruck specifically, but yes, brakes are virtually always capable of providing more stopping force than the engine can oppose.

> The issue shouldn't be present in all trucks, but better to recall all of them to be safe.

There is a video floating around of this issue, and based on that I'd call it an issue in all shipped trucks. While only a couple had it loose from the factory, the fact the two plates are only press fitted and when it slides up there is a perfect nook for it to get stuck in is a huge problem.

If I was a Cybertruck owner I'd inspect it at least every week and schedule the recall work ASAP.

They aren't only press fitted, they are glued together, but a change on assembly line lead to chance that some soap got on pedal and prevented the glue from bonding the two parts

Sounds like a screw would be better.

> What happens if you fully press both the acceleration and brake pedals? I would hope for the brakes to be more powerful and stop the car, is that the case?

You get a “both pedals pressed” alert and the accelerator is ignored, so the brakes don’t even need to overcome the engines. The behaviour is logical at least since tesla added blended braking (though I’d assume it also did that before then).

However as soon as you release the brakes the car starts accelerating as whatever the throttle is at again.

NHTSA targets a 5th percentile person being able to stop the car with the engine at full throttle. https://www.autosafety.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/The-Br...

Not related to your comment itself, but that’s a really bad paper/document. When analyzing the case “sudden full throttle when the car is stopped”, it is assumed that breaking only begins after 1.5s. Does a normal driver not keep the brake held while stopped at a traffic light. Also, he later assumes that data from a drag race can be compared to the case of sudden acceleration when at a stop because drag race drivers should floor the throttle, too. As far as I know, flooring is often not the fastest way to accelerate (just like fully braking compared to ABS), so the drag race data does not necessarily represent full throttle from a stop.

It feels like web community’s reponse to Elon Inc businesses, including Tesla and SpaceX, is frequently a double standard. By that I mean that Tesla gets a hall pass on crucial QC detail work because they’re iterating or ironing out the detail as if it’s a web app.

Meanwhile I’m not so sure the same leniency applies to Chevy or Toyota or whatever.

I don’t deny that iteration is a crucial process. Also I’m not advocating for a hall pass for big auto. I just think this is a really big oversight and mistake. When you’re dealing with software that doesn’t directly impact lives, go ahead: break stuff. But when we’re talking about big ass trucks on roads, there should be a harsh response to a recall like this.

What hall pass? It's the opposite, the media blows a minor issue at Tesla out of proportion, while there are no national headlines about Fords or Jeeps getting recalled for bursting into flames

https://www.powernationtv.com/post/auto-brands-with-the-most...

Not sure that's true. I have a Chevy Bolt and when those were exploding (lol), it was all over the news. So much so that there are still parking garages that won't let you park a Bolt in the garage.

We heard a lot about Toyota bz4x lug nuts and that recall was smaller than this cybertruck recall.

How long did it take Toyota to troubleshoot the issue, fix it and restart the problem? How does that compare?

It's just the halo/horns effect. If you think (Tesla|SpaceX) is an innovative company doing some great envelope-pushing stuff then you probably empathise with their engineers more than usual and you're willing to give them a pass. If you think Elon is a (bigoted man-child|burgeoning danger to western democracy) then you probably think negatively about his companies and you're more likely to do the opposite.

At the risk of sounding trite, it's incredibly difficult to form a balanced opinion on any situation because the little lizard brain inside always wants to steer you one way or another.

The best bit is that both is true, as Tesla / SpaceX aren’t the same thing as Elon.

There's not any universal treatment.

There does seem to be a borderline cult of personality around the guy, composed of people that more or less seem motivated to come up with a reason to excuse anything. But that isn't that big a group of people, they are just loud.

There's also plenty of people that are loud because they don't like his politics/attitude.

That's been a problem in the auto industry in general, not just with Musk.

Honda's shipped a whole generation of Accord with a bad transmission. Civic clear coat failures were horrible for a while. Nissan has had huge issues with CVTs.

Chevy or Ford would be treated much worse for similar situations. There are patterns, and real disconnects between the reputational damage that is done and underlying vehicle reliability.

Can you put cybertruck in neutral? That's the SOP for ICE cars if accelerator is stuck.

No but the brake pedal overrides the accelerator. Of course, EV’s accelerate fast so you likely don’t have much time to react

The video in thread says park also overrides the accelerator.

Electric cars don't have a gearbox that you can put into neutral

They have a reverser switch and neutral cuts off the power to the engine, forward excites windings in one way, reverse in the opposite way

Yes; there's no gearstalk but you can set p/r/n/d via the buttons on the overhead console, or on the touchscreen.

Granted, this isn't a usual occurence so maybe not a reasonable use case for the design.

But man, when accelerating at max power due to a glitch, you need to look at the touchscreen to find the right place to slide your finger to switch to neutral... I thougt having touch controls for climate was bad.

> That's the SOP for ICE cars if accelerator is stuck.

That is totally wrong. Most/all cars won't even go into neutral if the throttle is pinned. Your best option, always, is to mash the brake pedal as hard as you possibly can. It will win every time, even if the car doesn't have throttle cutoff.

Car and Driver disagrees with you regarding shifting to neutral. Can you provide additional info?

Shifting into reverse on most modern automatic transmissions requires the brake pedal to be depressed at least a tiny bit. Neutral has no pin.

In fact this is a somewhat little advertised boon to three point turns, in that you can go from reverse to drive without depressing the release button on floor mounted shifters or pulling the stalk in on steering wheel mounted units. You can just slap the car into D from R.

interesting that this hasn't caused a significant stock slide. Does that mean that the expectation for failures and mishaps is already priced in?

Car manufacturers have quite a few recalls like this. Some of Tesla's are even OTA fixes but require a "recall" to be announced. I think given the small volume of Cybertrucks in circulation AND the low volume being produced this has negligible effect on their bottom line of deliveries and revenues.

Even if Tesla's rosiest projections for CT were true, it'd be less than 20% of unit volume. Reality might be under 15%.

It doesn't really move the needle either way.

Is it surprising that a company that thought a vehicle this absurd was a good idea to build would also suffer from quality control issues?

This is why having a dealer network is important, if annoying. Tesla has been a leader in having a "software defined car" so lots of problems can be fixed via over the air updates. They should be glad this issue was found early and not after 5 years and 2 million vehicles on the road.

Tesla has service centers to deal with these do they not? Not sure how dealers makes it any easier to manage the recall

Traditional automakers have more dealers than Tesla has service centers. Tesla service is known for long wait times. Ford, for example, has 15x as many locations to get your vehicle serviced.

A bit unfair to compare Tesla to a company that's built a dealer network over 100+ years.

They're competing in the same market, people expect the same quality.

Fairness has nothing to do with anything here. First of all, it's the reality of having a Tesla worked on, regardless of blame. Second, Tesla's lack of a US dealer network is very intentional and they've fought very hard against the legal status quo to avoid having one at all.

but it wouldn't be a big issue if it went 5 years unnoticed.

This would not have been a serious problem had the lower back of the pedal footwell section been flush with the upper back section. How this design was able to pass QA is baffling.

It's truly wild to me that people will pay upwards of $100k to be beta-testers for a several thousand pound machine easily capable of killing them or others

At this point I wonder if Musk is so insecure about anyone being him at anything that he decided to pick on Boeing.

btw whatever happened with Toyota's "Spaghetti Code" accelerator?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudden_unintended_acceleration...

To repeat what I wrote on that post, this is all 100% explainable by Tesla's sacred five-step algorithm for manufacturing[a]:

1. Make the requirements less dumb: "All designs are wrong, it’s just a matter of how wrong." - Musk

2. Try and delete parts (that seem unnecessary): "If parts are not being added back into the design at least 10% of the time, not enough parts are being deleted." - Musk

3. Simplify or optimize: "The most common error of a smart engineer is to optimize something that should not exist." - Musk

4. Accelerate cycle time: "You're moving too slowly, go faster! But don’t go faster until you’ve worked on the other three things first." - Musk

5. Finally, as a last step, automate. "I've made the mistake of going backwards on all five steps." - Musk

Evidently the accelerator pedal issue was caused by step #2: At some point, the Cybertruck team at Tesla questioned the requirement to securely tighten the metal plate covering the accelerator pedal, and somehow concluded it seemed unnecessary. Now they have to add it back!

---

[a] https://evannex.com/blogs/news/elon-musk-reveals-his-5-step-...

And from somewhere far above or below us, 'Mad Man' Muntz, wire cutters still in his hand, smiles at Elon.

Thanks for that. I laughed out loud at "far above or below us".

"Recall all Cybertrucks" isn't a huge deal. How many have they sold? 3000? 4000?

Huge, no. But "all" is where it becomes halfway newsworthy.

Other manufacturers have made the news for smaller recalls, so this is pretty normal. Toyota, for example, when they recalled the bz4x.

My dad lives by using dish soap to lube up hoses and other connectors. This has that vibe.

For context, worse things happen at sea...

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/feb/01/royal-navy-o...

Ironically, they could’ve used glue instead of soap with no delay in assembly time

Or designed it with simple snaps.

Stick a fork in it. It’s done.

Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha whew.

Move fast and break things, ketamine-fueled edition!

Relax , it is just an OTA .

not this time

Good thing this shit isn't street legal in the EU. They at least have some amount of will to enforce basic car design safety.

Don't worry, Tesla's next car will be a lot safer:

https://www.imcdb.org/i733450.jpg

>Tesla is recalling all 3,878

So one of the smallest recalls in recent history? I understand that this company, its CEO, and this vehicle in question are all controversial, however the levels of attention coming from media are getting to be a bit too much. If you look at NHTSA's data and take a data-driven approach (just sort by potentially affected), you will find this to be quite normal.

https://datahub.transportation.gov/Automobiles/NHTSA-Recalls...

So they shouldn't have published a story on this? Shouldn't have used the word "all?" What exactly are you complaining about? Just that the "lol Musk" media clickbait factory is lame? Cause this seems newsworthy to me and I don't find fault with the story published here.

Yeah, it's the clickbait. Every step and mis-step Tesla has is criticized beyond what I think is reasonable amounts. It's just sloppy journalism and clickbait.

There's a ton of that crap no doubt, and I'm sure this recall will produce more of it, but this news story and headline seems totally fine to me.

I have absolutely no skin in the game, but to my understanding Tesla’s entire valuation heavily depends on being constant news cycles. It has positive impacts (like gigantic growth rate with limited marketing in the past 10 years) and negatives (any mistake gets chewed by the media).

Suzuki recalled a single car: https://japanesenostalgiccar.com/news-suzuki-issues-recall-f...

Suzuki recalled a single 21 year old car because it was missing a single stamp on the engine block and replaced the entire engine.

I guess the budget for QA went straight into Elon's pay package

His salary from Tesla's bank accounts is zero. Companies don't have their market cap in their bank accounts as cash which they use to pay executives.

Also, not like other automakers don't have recalls like this. You just don't hear about it here because... reasons. The legendary name for quality, Toyota had its wheels literally falling off.

Aye, Tesla pays him nothing, that's why his compensation package was struck down in court?

Yes.

> Tesla noted that since 2018, Musk hasn't drawn any compensation, including salary or cash bonuses

His stock compensation was performance based/

> Shareholders approved Musk’s pay package back in 2018. However, according to an Axios report, very few investors at the time believed that they would have to pay out on it. That’s because the compensation plan was tied to extreme performance goals that seemed improbable Therefore, at the time, the expected value of the Tesla pay package was “closer to zero than it was to $56 billion”

You cannot pay for auto parts quality with stock options that pay out only when 'extreme peformance goals' are hit. So Musk's salary had pretty much zero impact on this recall, unlike, say, other company car recalls which they could have presumably used the company CEO's salary to prevent the recalls, going by the assumption that the OP was making.

His compensation was in stock options.

Those are still something of value that the company is giving to him. They’re just not cash.

The point is that you cannot pay for car quality with stock options that are worth zero if the stock doesn't double and car sale increases don't meet really high metrics. So the OP in this thread is wrong.

What they said would be true of all the other car companies that directly pay the CEO, and they all have safety recalls. Lets take Toyota. Toyota could've used some of the CEOs pay to stop wheels from falling off their cars recently.

Okay, that’s a good point. It’s not liquid. In theory, though, surely the company could sell stock (or options, even) instead of granting it to Elon?

[Edit: this is all a bit academic though. I don’t think Tesla’s process problems, of whatever magnitude you think they are, are as simply solved as “if they just spent a bit more this would be fine!”, or that the ‘solution’ to the Elon problem, of whatever magnitude you think that is, is “if they just paid him less!”]

As of now he is actually paid 0 for last 4 years when Tesla stock has gone up by 900% (even after the recent stock slide).

People forget that if the stock price didn’t at least double and Tesla meet some manufacturing and sales quotas, Elon’s pay package would be 0. The only reason he’s getting paid 44B or whatever number is because the stock price has gone through the roof and the Model Y has become the best selling car in the US. On top of that, he is required to hold the stock for at least 5 years, so even if the judge didn’t invalidate his pay, he wouldn’t see any liquidity for at least 5 years.

You don’t need to like Elon to see that his pay package was completely fine. I doubt many CEO’s would accept a pay package where they don’t get paid a dime unless the stock price at least doubles, a very large number of CEO’s would also be paid 0 under such a pay package.

How does this not create perverse incentives? I have noticed that Musk has repeatedly made fraudulent claims about Tesla. I can't help but wonder how many of his fantastical claims are precisely in service of boosting the stock price. Also what exactly are the material consequences for him if he didn't get paid by Tesla? Essentially zero.

> I can't help but wonder how many of his fantastical claims are precisely in service of boosting the stock price

Like these ones where he said the stock price was too high and it then crashed a a full 10%?

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/01/tesla-ceo-elon-musk-says-sto...

Or when he said Tesla is worth approximately zero without FSD fully functional?

Stock price based compensation is extremely common for top exectives.

“Material consequences if he didn’t get paid by Tesla” sounds so scarily close to communism “To each according to his need, from each according to his ability”. It shouldn’t matter whether he needs it or not. It was an agreement that was made, an agreement I think was pretty fair and one that most corporate CEO’s in America today would not take but Elon took it, won that agreement and now people are balking up at payment. Promises made, promises kept or society does not function, “need” is the absolute last thing that should ever matter in this calculus

tesla booked musk's much-discussed options package as a $2.5 billion expense. opportunity cost aside, it's silly to imply that a public company isn't going to act differently after it's stuck a significant fraction of its revenue on the wrong side of its balance sheet: analysts definitely will be.

> tesla booked musk's much-discussed options package as a $2.5 billion expense

As stated elsewhere the point is that you cannot pay for car quality with stock options that are worth zero if the stock doesn't double and car sale increases don't meet really high metrics

Unlike the other car companies that pay CEOs directly, like Toyota could've used their CEO's pay to instead maybe stop their wheels from falling off recently.

> it's silly to imply that a public company isn't going to act differently after it's stuck a significant fraction of its revenue on the wrong side of its balance sheet

What? The $2.5B isn't coming from revenue.

If Elons pay package from 2018 gets revoked and they issue a new one (supposedly after moving from Delaware to Texas law), then it’s estimated Tesla will have $20bn+ accounting charge

But did he provide value to shareholders ?

Just to add context since I was curious about "Toyota had it wheels literally falling off".

That was a recall from 2022 (https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/06/business/toyota-bz4x-wheel-fi...) for 260 vehicles (their model BZ4X electric SUV).

The Cybertruck recall affects 3,878 vehicles (https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a60538687/2024-tesla-cyber...).

That's some misleading context since the article you linked says:

> Only 260 BZ4Xs had been delivered to customers before the recall was announced

If they had sold 4000 like the truck, they would have recalled 4000. Both recalls affected all the cars sold for the model.

I don't think its too misleading because in both cases that's how many vehicles are affected at very moment by the recall.

Toyota shipped/sold more as mentioned in the article, but those are unaffected. Likewise with the Tesla, any shipped afterward the defect was discovered are unaffected.

Any idea why this is flagged?

Most likely because there have been oodles of low-quality stories on these topics. We turned the flags off on this one since it maybe rises above the noise (see https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... for past explanations on how we approach that).

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