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.

https://hackaday.com/2022/10/30/recreating-the-stuck-throttle-problem-on-a-toyota/