Tesla Inc (TSLA)

[boston745]

RECREATING THE “STUCK THROTTLE” PROBLEM ON A TOYOTA

While most passenger vehicles older than about 15-20 years controlled the throttle with a cable connected directly from the throttle body to the accelerator pedal, most manufacturers have switched to a fly-by-wire system which takes sensor input from the accelerator pedal and sends that position information to the vehicle’s computer which in turn adjusts the throttle position. This might be slightly cheaper to manufacture, but introduces a much larger number of failure modes to a critical system.

[Colin] is recreating one of those failure modes by introducing an electromagnetic pulse at a specific point on the vehicle’s computer. In the real world, this could be caused by certain forms of EMF potentially including cosmic rays. This introduces a memory fault which the computer doesn’t seem capable of recognizing or clearing. With the right set of circumstances that [Colin] can reliably produce, the computer eventually will drive the throttle fully open, and the condition can only be corrected by power-cycling the vehicle’s computer.

Computer will drive the throttle position fully open and it takes a hard reset to clear the error. I am not sure this is exactly what is going on in Teslas but they definitely behave this way with hundreds to thousands of people experiencing SUA in them. As I pointed out in my previous posts, the Teslas keep driving forward until something stops their momentum. An example of this happened Feb last year.
https://hackaday.com/2022/10/30/recreating-the-stuck-throttle-problem-on-a-toyota/

"The car just kept going by itself and just hit the wall and went into the home," he said. "It took the kitchen island out. The refrigerator out."

The weight of the collapsed wall halted the car's forward progress. But the wheels kept spinning until the stunned driver got the car to turn off.

Teslas and other EVs are very dangerous because of how often they glitch in this manner. But as you can see newer ICE vehicles, like Toyotas 15 years ago, can experience SUA problem as well. Just seems to be far less frequent. In 2023 Teslas experienced an average of 14 (just under every other day) out of control SUA accidents a month that made the news.

20. Feb 6th (37.7574019, -121.9128575)
https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/out-of-control-tesla-slams-into-san-ramon-home/