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Tesla Y (copyright Tesla Inc.)Tesla denies malfunction caused crash that killed cyclist
Tesla Inc. is assisting a police investigation in China's Guangdong province after a fatal crash that killed a cyclist and motorcyclist involved one of its Model Y sports utility vehicles.
The company says it does not believe the incident was caused by a malfunction as Bloomberg reports data taken from the vehicle showed no proof the brake had been applied before the crash, while footage does not show the brake light activated.
It is being reported that instead the vehicle data shows the accelerator was heavily engaged in the moments before a motorcyclist and high-school student riding a bicycle were hit and killed in Chaozhou on November 5.
Footage which circulated on Chinese social media site Weibo apparently shows the Model Y accelerating before crashing and prompted a "family member of the driver" to claim the driver had lost control for more than one-and-a-half miles and could not slow the car down.
The family member suggested a technical problem with the vehicle must have caused the collision, something Tesla denies but says it will work with Chinese police to assist with the investigation.
The Model Y is Tesla's fully electric sports utility vehicle and has 'autopilot' technology, although there is no suggestion the vehicle was in autopilot mode during the aforementioned incident.
Tesla says the vehicle weighs almost two tonnes (1,995kg) and can hit top speeds of 150mph, with a 0-60mph time of 3.5 seconds.
"Safety is the most important part of every Tesla. We design our vehicles to exceed safety standards," the brand says on its website before stating the Model Y achieved a 5-star Euro NCAP safety rating.
Back in May a Tesla Model 3 under test detected and braked to avoid collision with a dummy cyclist crossing its path, something an assisted driving system installed in a Subaru car failed to do five times during the same testing.
However, the company's coverage on this website has not always been so positive. In February we shared footage from San Francisco of a YouTuber almost ramming a cyclist while his Tesla was in Full Self-Driving (FSD) Beta mode.
Earlier in the same month another video showed the same Beta in another vehicle causing a Tesla to crash into a cycle lane bollard. That clip came just weeks after Elon Musk had claimed the programme had not been responsible for a single collision since its release in October 2020.
Dan is the road.cc news editor and joined in 2020 having previously written about nearly every other sport under the sun for the Express, and the weird and wonderful world of non-league football for The Non-League Paper. Dan has been at road.cc for four years and mainly writes news and tech articles as well as the occasional feature. He has hopefully kept you entertained on the live blog too.
Never fast enough to take things on the bike too seriously, when he's not working you'll find him exploring the south of England by two wheels at a leisurely weekend pace, or enjoying his favourite Scottish roads when visiting family. Sometimes he'll even load up the bags and ride up the whole way, he's a bit strange like that.
Latest Comments
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Is it just me who thinks the first two items can be used to smuggle a phone into prison?
- David9694 49 min 17 sec ago
was it one of these? https://www.autotrader.co.uk/car-details/202411246675771?
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I may not have expressed myself clearly, I meant that it would be okay for cycle racers because it's banned, rather than that it wouldn't be...
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Houchen is utterly corrupt and morally bankrupt, as readers of Private Eye know all too well.
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https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cd7n1l72j9wo
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ALERT!!! SAVE 100%!!! Stay home!
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Deflect. Deflect! DEFLECT!! If the lad was in the drivers 'blind spot' no amount of high-viz and lights would have done any good. There is NO...
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Reminds me of this story:
Skoda driver decapitated after claiming car's cruise control was stuck
Lots of people commenting who don't appear to have seen the video evidence of the Tesla accelerating with the brake lights ON, then going on to do extremely high speed with only steering inputs to avoid collisions happening.
To me, it looks exactly like the Tesla decided it wanted a joyride and the driver was unable to stop it.
The only video which shows the rear lights with any degree of clarity (as it starts going out of control) don't show any brake lights in my opinion. The lights showing are at the side which are the rear lights. The brake lights on a model Y are in the middle of the light setup AND a central one in the top of the rear window. None of those appear lit.
Things as innocuous as floor mats have in the past been blamed for jamming accelerators and causing 'runaway cars'.
In other news today VW and Ford have closed their Argo AI self-driving division. I think this is good news, but the industry has apparently spent some $87million to date on such technology, so clearly I'm wrong!
I've had it happen to me 3 times...
The pedal catching on the other side of the floor mat caught me by suprise but a quick kick of the mat solved it.
I also had a throttle cable stick wide open.
Run-on in a Turbo Diesel on the motorway, which was genuinely scarey.
All caused confusion and minor panic, first two I just about managed to solve before a collision. I ma have just been lucky with the thid one as it solved itself somehow.
I would expect most would not manage to deal with these situations so well but I'm sure it's pretty rare and I've just been unlucky.
For the latter two, can anyone confirm whether removing the ignition key would "stop" the engine? I have never had the need or want to attempt to turn off the engine whilst driving but wondered if there is a safety feature to stop it when doing any forward speed. Also would be a question for Tesla's as well.
FWIW, I once had to try this in a Mark 2 Escort. Driving at night the throttle jammed on & couldn't think of any way of regaining control except by turning the ignition off. Unfortunately, this meant the lights went to side lights only & the brake servo stopped working. Both extremely scary in themselves; I couldn't see, I could hardly brake.
In panic I switched the ignition back on & thankfully the stuck throttle cable came unstuck after a second. Not an experience I wish to repeat.
Arent Teslas keyless entry/ignition anyway?
Maybe cars from 40 years back the key was interlocked in the ignition barrel so you had to turn it to off to remove it which cut the engine...and might trigger the steering lock so not always a great plan.
With keyless it's just a stop/start button. There are different types of keyless, I've had hire cars where you can keep the key in your handbag, pockets for you guys, to ones where you have to plug the key in, but I'm sure I've accidentally hit a plug in key and ejected it once the engine was running and it didnt kill the engine, I was still sat on my drive so I just pushed it back in.
In a ICE car you should always be able to put the car in Neutral, even in an automatic.
Tesla's apparently have the gear selection hidden in a touch-screen menu though, so good luck doing that in an emergency - https://www.carthrottle.com/post/teslas-new-touchscreen-gear-selector-so...
Don't remove the key - unless you want to go in whatever direction the steering locks in - and remember power steering will cut out and become extremely heavy on a modern car (probably unusable on an SUV for the average surprised driver).
A modern diesel it is fuel injected and cutting the ignition will stop the fuel delivery. Old diesels wouldn't stop because they had mechanical pumps and of course no ignition so you needed to explicitly cut off the fuel to stop the engine.
If you pay $8 a month you get a blue tick on your bike in the Tesla self driving mode algorithms. A cheap and effective way to keep you safe!!
You may joke but apparently you need a tesla fitted tow bar before they will download the towing software to your vehicle. However they don't actually have any in stock so essentially will not allow the car to tow anything.
I think we may have read the same twitter thread. A bit weird but the software update is to adjust the handling, so things may go wrong if you tow without it.
Ridiculous that you have to buy their towbar.
I would have thought it would turn off all the driving alerts and the ability to "autopilot" as all the sensors would pick up the towed item as a danger.
In general, pedestrians and cyclists would be safer with a 'sensible' self driving car than with the human driver of an Audi or BMW- the problem is that the unpleasant character traits of the sort of people who buy Audis, BMWs and Teslas will still pervert any self driving car, no matter how good its software. With the police and courts in established 'if cyclists don't want to be killed they should stay off the roads' mode, and willing to accept any excuse with alacrity we are in trouble!
However you might find that the directors of the companies producing these 'sensible' self driving cars (and their sales reps!) might be exactly those who drive an Audi or BMW in a sporty fashion when they're not fronting for their employer * . Or that at some point they e.g. override engineers' concerns to get something to happen quickly. It has happened...
* No idea of the specifics of the current companies - but I imagine to get to such a position requires a certain "bullishness" or optimism and strong belief in one's own ability.
Established mode eh? 🧐
Well, they would say that, wouldn't they...?
Out of 1,5+ billion people, I am sure there will be one rich enough to have a Tesla and panicked enough to hit the accelerator instead of the brake pedal. The unfortunate thing is that two people lost their lives.
With all the bad driving existing, I believe that in 10 years there will be fully self driving vehicles that will be much safer for everyone for less than 30k price.
Surely ... "there was a malfunction and the driver couldn't slow down for a mile and a half" is just the modern high-tech version of SMIDSY or "the sun was in my eyes". Namely, the software included in a Tesla provides ready made excuses for driver error that require massive time and expense to fully investigate.
Having cars with all this technology and software is all well and good but (a) drivers come to rely on the tech and place less emphasis on their own driving and (b) they have something (that is not them) to blame if anything goes wrong.
These things need big e-stop buttons just like any of the far less dangerous industrial machines where I work. It should either have the battery power run through it directly, or if not feasable due to the current involved, go to a big dumb fail-open relay. It should not just send a CAN or low voltage signal to the ECU. It should be reachable by a feeble driver even under maximum acceleration.
I'll take one that goes to injector power or fuel cutoff on a ICE vehicle too, thanks.
Remember when these used to be on busses?
They got put under the engine access after kids - and disgruntled cyclists - kept hitting them.
Just don't let morons drive cars. This isn't a Tesla problem, it's someone showing off and ending up killing a cyclist, and now seeking to blame anyone but themselves.
This wouldn't be the first time that a driver crashed because they've been pressing the accelerator when they thought that they were pressing the brake.
The fact that the car is so ludicrously quick that it reached 123mph on urban roads hardly screams "safety". As ever, vehicle safety is primarily focused on those inside of the box, not outside of it.
Not necessarily so. I heard tale of an issue with the door locking on Teslas such that if it catches on fire, the doors won't unlock. I don't know if that came from a verified tweet or not though.
(Just looked it up and there's a manual door unlock if the driver remembers it. The incident that was reported involved the driver kicking out the door window in order to escape, so presumably he'd forgotten about it)
Appears that there's a website for tracking Tesla fires: https://www.tesla-fire.com/
There was a spate of accelerator/brake issues on Priuses in the US a few years back. Analysis showed is was driver error, but that didn't stop a mass panic that people were dying because Priuses had a fault. That then made it more likely that people would die when they made the same mistake, as they assumed that it was the car rather than driver error and didn't correct the error. In the end, Toyota recalled the cars, even though there was nothing wrong with them.
There was a spate of accelerator/brake issues on Priuses in the US a few years back
That's not the first time in the USA. When I was working over there in the late 80s there was another spate of 'Sudden Unexplained Acceleration Incidents' involving American cars suddenly shooting into things like garage walls, etc. The point was made that these incidents took place in what were described as 'Medicare Sleds rather than Rice Rockets' (there was a lot of fuss about Japanese imports then, and I seem to remember the cars involved were Mercury models), and the conclusion was that 'the dumb schmucks pressed the gas instead of the brake'. Sounds exactly like these rumours about the Prius- which was very likely completely innocent
IIRC several cars have had reported issues of sudden unexpected acceleration only in the US.
Every piece of evidence I have seen suggests it has been cars with accelerators/brakes spaced slightly closer together (not standardised and usually not american brands) compared to most vehicles sold in the US combined with people at best hitting both together, with the response to it not slowing being push harder...
Add in an electric car with insane acceleration and you have a perfect source for high speed collisions.
Its surprisingly easy to do with auto 'boxes. Likewise for anyone used to a stick shift faced with an auto and hitting the brake when going for the non-existent clutch.
The first time I drove an auto was a Jeep Wrangler on holiday, and I did exactly this in the hotel carpark, skidding to an abrupt stop when I instinctively tried to dip the clutch. Slightly embarrasing, but I made a point of putting my left foot somewhere else in the footwell and I've not had any issues going between manuals and autos since.
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