US has over 750 complaints that Teslas brake for no reason

[Omaha Steve]

Source: AP

By TOM KRISHER

DETROIT (AP) — More than 750 Tesla owners have complained to U.S. safety regulators that cars operating on the automaker’s partially automated driving systems have suddenly stopped on roadways for no apparent reason.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration revealed the number in a detailed information request letter to Tesla that was posted Friday on the agency’s website.

The 14-page letter dated May 4 asks the automaker for all consumer and field reports it has received about false braking, as well as reports of crashes, injuries, deaths and property damage claims. It also asks whether the company’s “Full Self Driving” and automatic emergency braking systems were active at the time of any incident.

The agency began investigating phantom braking in Tesla’s Models 3 and Y last February after getting 354 complaints. The probe covers an estimated 416,000 vehicles from the 2021 and 2022 model years. In February, the agency said it had no reports of crashes or injuries.



FILE - The Tesla company logo sits on a vehicle at a Tesla dealership in Littleton, Colo., on Feb. 2, 2020. The U.S. government’s road safety agency has dispatched a team to investigate the possibility that a Tesla involved in a California crash that killed three people was operating on a partially automated driving system. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration on Wednesday, May 18, 2022 confirmed that it had sent a special crash investigation team to probe the May 12 crash on the Pacific Coast Highway in Newport Beach. (AP Photo/David Zalubowski, File)


Read more: https://apnews.com/article/technology-politics-health-cd1a51e26baa07678de50cab8ae90ee0

[harumph]

1. Execute order 66

[anarch]

2. and so it begins...the Teslas have become self-aware!!1!1

I mean think about it, there they are driving along, looking around, then suddenly..."oh fuck this, everything is completely ridiculous here, I won't take part in it anymore!" and then they just stop. This will end up just like 'The Terminator,' I tell you!

[Effete Snob]

3. "Bonus stops"

The memo says to call them "bonus stops".

The advanced driver psychology monitor determines when the driver and passengers need a break to improve their mood.

DON'T YOU REALIZE THAT ELON MUSK IS MAKING THE WORLD A BETTER PLACE? WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU?

[Harker]

6. I'd go with "bogus stops", maybe. n/t

[2naSalit]

4. I don't think I'd ever...

Last edited Fri Jun 3, 2022, 10:57 AM - Edit history (1)

Sit my bony butt down in one of those things, not if I don't have control over its operation. No thanks.

Anyone who has ever been in a situation where the brakes have failed or an uncontrollable slide on the ice might agree with me on that.

I wonder how many glitches have plagued that product line, that were kept quiet, occurred before that first fatality several years ago.

When I was visiting a friend in Phoenix a couple years back, there were reports of people attacking the autonomous vehicles and damaging them. I think there will always be opposition to them, I will never accept them nor will I be driving anywhere that I might encounter them. By the time they become ubiquitous, I should be dead.

[Newland56]

12. Best car ever

Best car I’ve ever owned
Bar none
From this point I doubt I’ll ever buy any other brand
About 300,000 miles on Tesla so far
We also have a leaf and have had an i pace
No comparison
I have never once not had control of the vehicle
At any point I can push the “gas” pedal and override and autonomous braking
At any point I can turn the steering wheel and override any auto steering
At any point I can step on the break pedal and override any autonomous acceleration
Anytime I engage any auto functions on the car I get an auditory notification and a message that tells me to still pay attention
No different than older cruise controls driving you into the rear end of the car in front

[2naSalit]

13. ...

No offense but, I have over 2 million miles logged as a driver for hire and I cannot imagine being in such a vehicle, not on the streets and highways of the US.

All those I can override... options make me think that I'd be put into a negotiated action or an actual contest with the vehicle itself just to make it do what I expect it to do. I've had team drivers that I had to dump before I got to the Mississippi for the same reasons. Yikes.

Driving requires one's attention at all times and there is no machine that can do it safely without an operator. Sounds like extra work. Even trains on rails with no place else to go, think subways, have operators for safety purposes.

Maybe we could just focus on making these vehicles safe and nonpolluting and work on perfecting that.

[Newland56]

17. Don't engage them

Pretty simple
Don’t engage them if you are afraid of them
I drive 35-40 thousand miles a year
And have a couple million miles under my belt as well
There really is no comparison
No offense but since I have owned both and you won’t try one of the two I don’t think your really qualified to compare.

While I don’t use the auto functions all that often, the data show significantly fewer accidents while on “auto pilot”
Per 100,000 miles vs non auto pilot driven vehicles.

Quite simply
About 1.8 to 2 million miles on non tesla vs a few hundred thousand miles on tesla there simply is no comparison in my book.
Not that it will happen but I would be interested in hearing your critique of tesla after you have put a couple hundred thousand miles on one to have a first hand experience to compare.

[2naSalit]

18. Do you drive it in winter?

[Newland56]

19. Yes

I do drive it in the winter
I have a 4wheel drive truck that gets about 500 miles a year use
The traction control on the tesla blows it completely out of the water if there is snow on the road.
I put x-ice tires on in November and rotate off in March.
The biggest part of my miles actually happens in winter.

I usually see a range decrease of about 12% in winter depending on how cold it is
If it’s down in single digits or below can go to 20%

If I remember to pre condition before leaving the house it’s much better

[William Seger]

5. One thing about the "deap learning" AI neural nets that power autonomous driving...

... is that we really don't know what they're doing when they decide to stop, for example, so it's not a matter of debugging it, looking for a coding error as you would in a procedural, deterministic program. And another thing to remember is that they will always make mistakes -- hopefully (and probably) fewer than human drivers.

[Harker]

7. Brings to mind the first time I saw the

"I brake for hallucinations" bumper sticker.

[2naSalit]

15. ...

[Harker]

28. It was in Boulder, CO...

and a good fit.

[JustABozoOnThisBus]

24. That could be tattooed on my cat.

I run, brake, turn, or jump for hallucinations.

[Harker]

25. Ah, yes...

often in complex, irreproducible sequences.

[infullview]

8. It was because of the excess bickering in the car

The computer just couldn't handle all that emotional tension. I remember a thread on DU that was firmly in support of autonomous vehicles - everyone was saying how much it would lower the vehicular death rate from accidents. Anyone who believes that is about as rational as Elon Musk.

[oioioi]

9. The line that cars could drive themselves in urban traffic with current infrastructure

is nonsense. Autonomous vehicles work for closed systems like mines, controlled airspace or even preset repetitive routes in open space with little traffic, e.g. Australia - but to suggest that they could safely operate in a current-day urban traffic environment without a human operator is beyond ridiculous.

[MarcA]

21. +1000 n/t

[dalton99a]

35. Pesky details. Elon is a Big Thinker

How can we ever go to the moon if we worry about details

[William Seger]

10. Oh, I believe that will be the case -- eventually

We're just not there yet, but it will happen.

[OnlinePoker]

14. A message came up on the screen

"If you don't stop fighting, I'm going to turn this car around and go home".

[2naSalit]

16. LOL!

My mom used to threaten to stop and put us out and make us walk. Your comment made me think of this first, though...

A buddy once told me that his mom, a mother of four boys, used to threaten,

"If you don't settle down I'm going to drive crazy and kill us all!"

Which, he claimed, actually worked.

[Farmer-Rick]

11. It's like those huge lumpy personal computers that first came out

For no apparent reason they would just stop working. You would have to reboot or turn it off for a couple of hours to get it going again. Those problems happened when they were only handling mostly word processing.

Seems Tesla needs more advanced computing systems.

[littlemissmartypants]

20. Sabotage...?

[Angleae]

27. Profit

See post #22

[littlemissmartypants]

34. May as well be sabotage. Self sabotage to be exact. Thanks for your reply, Angleae. ❤

[tinrobot]

22. 750 filed complaints. There are far more people who've experienced it but haven't filed.

The problem is that Tesla relies mostly on optical cameras instead of radar to determine what is in front of the vehicle. That creates far more false positives.

Dropping radar makes the cars less expensive to build, meaning more profits for Tesla, but less safety for drivers.

[sarcasmo]

23. How many complaints before a recall is issued?

[mathematic]

26. You'd think with Musk in charge there would be no brakes

[RussBLib]

29. yeah, no thanks

until the charging network is much more ubiquitous, and until all these ICE-heads quit blocking and sabotaging charging stations, I'll stay away from a full EV and stick with my PHEV.

[oioioi]

31. Charging is ridiculous. Wait for swapping...

[RussBLib]

32. how about some damn solar panels on the car...

...to keep the charging continuous? And put a couple of high-efficiency wind turbines on there to use the breeze to recharge the battery.

Or carry a portable device that you can plug in to give you an extra 50-200 miles. Or...

[oioioi]

33. The problem with panels is that it needs a much larger surface area

The energy you could get from panels on a car is pretty tiny considering the cost. Battery swapping is the logical solution - it provides a way for existing gas station infrastructure to transition and it's about the same time to swap a battery as it is to pump gas. Additionally a swapped battery can be charged at a time and place where the consumer electrical grid isn't unduly stressed by everyone charging their cars at once. The "portable device" is a swap battery, which is basically the same consumer experience as fueling with gasoline. China is already working to standardize swap batteries to this end.

[soryang]

30. I've had OTR tractors brake when it was not needed

It was on the late model trucks. They weren't AI. They had a safe distance braking system with a radar detector emitting forward to ensure safe separation from the traffic in front of the truck. It braked so many times unnecessarily I had to shut it off. I stopped using it altogether. It's probably not relevant to the OP story, but my guess was that the truck's radar emitter would get false returns, especially on turns with passing vehicles or even metal fences on the side of the road, giving false indications of an unsafe closure rate.

[Wonder Why]

36. Wait a second! You mean after the first 500 complaints,

the other 250 people didn't say to themselves "I'd better not use it. I could die!" and instead continued to use it until it happened to them?

Do you have to lack a brain to turn it on?

Did their False Idol, Elon the Magnificent, tell them to ignore the problem as they won't encounter it?

Did Trump tell them "It's just another Covid Hoax"?