The rear brakes locked and were dragged ~50 feet. The front axle CONTINUED pulling the Cybertruck for those 50 feet, with the brakes applied.
There is absolutely no engineering case in which this should be expected behavior.
Let’s wait until we know more details of what happened. This could’ve been the trucks fault, or it could’ve been the driver falling asleep and blaming the truck. If this was poor design on Tesla’s fault, then yes we criticize them, however we criticize the company as a whole (including musk), not just their CEO.
I’m not sure why everyone is so entrenched and hyper fixated one way or another on one human being.
Yes, there are some unknowns here, would be great to find out all the details.
> This could’ve been the trucks fault, or it could’ve been the driver falling asleep and blaming the truck.
But based on the facts known so far, we know this is not it. The driver was braking hard given the locked rear wheels.
For example I'm really interested in how they determined that the "back" tires were locked.
The back axle has 2x the power of the front in the Cyberbeast. The suspicious part is the the driver said the steering was non-responsive.
Without better information, I suspect either user or system failure with full throttle and brakes causing the front wheels to lock up (because they have more brake force and half HP) causing the loss of steering and back wheels overpowering brakes.
In just about any vaguely modern car hitting the brakes will disengage the throttle. In just about any car the brakes should be able to overpower the engine. There is no situation in which a car should be moving if you hit the brakes and the gas simultaneously.
Even if this is user error, there's something clearly wrong with how the car behaved in this situation.
Whatever he's getting, he brought it on himself.
The behaviour of using a screen with submenus to setup things while you're driving is madness if you think about it. We're not allowed to use our touch screen phones while driving but are allowed to use a touch screen bolted-on touch screen.
I own a Tesla Model 3, and have ranted about how awful its touchscreen only control is bad for ages, but the Ford is significantly worse. Just today, the truck’s UI bugged out in such a way that half the exterior lights were blinking, while a period bell sound would blast every few seconds. A message on the screen complained that the car “needed to be running to…” with the rest cut off by a nondescript grey square.
I know, by observation, on my Prius that "panic stop" brake pressure disconnects the hybrid system due to all the noise that the contactors make when this happens, vs. lighter braking within the regeneration limits. Braking and power never ever fight one another though. I've tried "power braking" the Prius, like you can with a normal automatic transmission car to load the engine, and it just doesn't do anything at all.
This article about the physically stuck pedals says that "Thankfully the truck cuts acceleration when you press the brake pedal..." but this seems to show otherwise.
https://jalopnik.com/tesla-cybertruck-slippery-pedal-recall-...
On a manual ICE vehicle it makes some sense to since you need to hold some brake while raising engine RPM for until the clutch engages. Not really sure what reason there would be on an electric vehicle to command the main motors to accelerate while brakes are applied.
>We have reviewed logs and due to the terrain the accelerator may or may not disengage when the brake is depressed
Can it be clearer than that?
They literally say that the Cybertruck may continue pressing on the gas pedal while the driver is slamming the brake pedal. That's, like, the first thing they tell you not to do.
Additionally, the engine being able to overpower the brakes while stationary (or close to that) is not something that you commonly see in automobiles. As in: I'm not aware of any other vehicle with brakes designed that badly.
As a cherry on top, the steering wheel was also non-operational during the incident. Which is surely an innovation in drive-by-wire implementations.
I wish it was illegal to have drive by wire in brakes or steering. These are the two most vital systems in a car that I absolutely need to retain control of in order to stay alive.
All software has some bugs, so we need to acknowledge that. Brakes and steering are too vital to let them be controlled by software alone, when we know there are always some bugs in all software.
Aside from the obvious answers (planes are regulated differently from cars, getting a pilot's license requires more training, etc), let me point out that autopilots for planes existed for over a century, but we are only getting some semblance of that in cars now because flying is a much easier control problem to solve.
See, there's not many obstacles in the air.
[citation needed]
Flying is the safest mode of transportation by a large margin[1], so you'd need to fudge your metric quite a lot to arrive with that conclusion.
That's before we get into the nitty-gritty of which incidents can be attributed to the autopilot failure to avoid apples-to-oranges comparisons.
[1]https://www.cnn.com/travel/worried-about-flying-heres-what-t...
Planes don't have brakes (while flying) anyway.
No, you're not the only one.
These should be regulated like black boxes on aircraft, and mandated to be available to the NHTSA.
I have to be very delicate with my brakes around town, because 15" ventilated disc brakes are great for high performance, but VERY grabby.
But at least I feel confident that they'll stop me (and keep me stopped) very quickly.
I installed the same last year, and the difference is obvious. I'm glad how "grabby" they were; a few times, it was an imminent accident without them.
I'll dispute that. Have you actually tried that? If so, your brakes are defective.
There's an easy intuitive way to visualize this. Remember that any change in speed or direction is acceleration. Braking is just acceleration with a negative sign.
The engine generates horsepower to accelerate the car from zero to some speed. While we don't usually speak of HP when talking about brakes, it is equivalent. We can also compute how many HP the brakes are producing when accelerating (with a negative sign) the car from that speed down to zero.
So: a car that has a more powerful engine than brakes would be able to accelerate from 0 to 60 (or pick some speed) faster than the time it takes to brake from 60 to zero.
Can you think of any car or truck that can accelerate faster than it can brake? Doubt it (unless the brakes are broken).
To your truck example, I have a one-ton turbo diesel truck. I hadn't tried this experiment so was curious after your comment and went for a drive. As I expected, if I hold down the brakes the truck won't budge even at full throttle. The brakes are massively more powerful than the engine.
They have to be, after all those brakes are designed to bring the full rated capacity of the truck and trailer (28,000lb) to a stop from highway speeds. The engine, while very powerful, has way less power (acceleration potential) than the brakes.
"2024 Tesla Cybertruck Dual Motor Foundation Series Specifications
0-60 MPH 3.8 sec
BRAKING, 60-0 MPH 126 ft"
Car accelerated ~~2/3 of the way on the video~~ Edit after re-watching: car was floored downhill with slight wheelspin for 8 seconds, it was slowing down when you can hear screaming tires for less than 2 seconds. Looks to me like it was fully braking after all, after someone decided to floor brand new 4 second to 60 EV vehicle into a building and shat his pants.
In case that is still too difficult, here's a link: https://x.com/bfreshwa/status/1803823968547217903
Edit: speaking of suppression of bad PR, HN mods nerfed this submission into the ground https://hnrankings.info/40782552/
> mods nerfed this submission into the ground
Because it's Jalopnik, known anti-EV and especially anti-Tesla page ran by Gawker. Look at all the submissions from the domain and tell me they aren't biased.
I had a look and they aren't biased. Care to point out how they are _all_ biased?