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SoCal man says computer on his Tesla froze, causing it to be stuck at 83 MPH
- dumbfounder 5y agoStuck at 83 until he used the brakes and steering to control the car? Doesn't sound very stuck. This is not a story.
- jpcfl 5y agoThe failure of any component required for functional safety is absolutely a story.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- epgui 5y agoI agree with you, but I also agree with the other commenter because I think the words we use matter. I think the failure could and should have been described a bit more accurately in the title.
- ceejayoz 5y ago> He said all of the buttons and switches - including turn signals and hazard lights - were not working. That's fairly concerning. If it was in self-drive mode, would the "you're on your own, autopilot disengaged" feature a) trigger and b) make the sound cue? Or would you run straight into the car in front of you?
- starwind 5y agoJust 5 mph too slow :/
- aperson_hello 5y agoOr alternatively, a safe 33mph margin to keep from exploding!
- sschueller 5y agoWell Tesla does share the abdominal quality that the DeLorean had.
- lepton 5y agoThat gut-wrenching feeling.
- jihadjihad 5y agoIndeed, and it is so hard to stomach.
- hcrisp 5y agoToo bad it wasn't a model X with gull-wing doors.
- willis936 5y agoNon-deterministic computation has no business being inside a safety-critical system. How is this legal?
- herpderperator 5y agoQuick side question... so he just admitted to speeding?
- wanderer_ 5y agoI imagine this story was worth orders of magnitude more to the news network than the ticket would be worth to the man... I'm sure they could make it worth his while :)
- tintor 5y agoTitle is click-bait. Vehicle was not "stuck" at 83mph. Brakes and steering were operational, while car computer rebooted.
- hammock 5y agoThat is still a big deal. See also the Toyota accelerator issue: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009%E2%80%932011_Toyota_vehicle_recalls https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009%E2%80%932011_Toyota_vehic...
- bin_bash 5y agoApparently you're not very familiar with how that story turned out: https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704422204576131311592922574 https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704422204576131... tl;dr: we don't really know what caused it but it wasn't electronics. Malcolm Gladwell did a great piece on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1N3naJ0P0gM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1N3naJ0P0gM
- hammock 5y agoWhy does it have to be electronics for my reference to matter? The idea is just because the brakes and steering still work doesn't mean the car is safe.
- bin_bash 5y ago> The third and most common problem was drivers hitting the gas when they thought they were hitting the brake, which the NHTSA called "pedal misapplication." The problem was drivers getting the pedals mixed up. There was nothing wrong with the cars and officials blamed the drivers—hence the title of the article: "U.S. Blames Drivers, Not Toyota"
- hammock 5y agoI thought “we don t really know what caused it.” Now you’re saying we do?
- netsharc 5y agoSigh, how do news sites get away with blatantly wrong titles? The driver was obviously able to brake, so it wasn't stuck at 83 MPH - although the display is frozen and showing that speed. Imagine if it's a headline like "Putin declares war over" and actually it's him saying something like "War will be over when Ukraine has a pro-Russian leadership".
- CoastalCoder 5y ago> Sigh, how do news sites get away with blatantly wrong titles? I don't mean this snarkily: Notice how your reaction was to complain about it, but (AFAIK) take no concrete action against the news site? I suspect most/all of the public did the same, and thus the new sites get away with it.
- netsharc 5y agoI saw a link to the "chief editor's" Twitter, but fuck Twitter. I just noticed "Report a correction or typo" which has the words "As a local news organization, we are committed to upholding our journalistic standards online, including accuracy." so I just told them now how they violated that standard. Well fuck, I've become a "Letters to the Editor" writter.
- SllX 5y agoYou joke but I wouldn’t be surprised to see a headline like your example at some point. I’ve seen similar clickbait, albeit for lower stakes.
- bombcar 5y agoWe have an example right here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31015652 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31015652 - the title implies but doesn't say, and the reality is that sanction busting was involved. Titles have become less than useless.
- andrewstuart2 5y agoThis is an interesting case but I wonder what the statistics are around this. Computers die just like cables snap. There will absolutely be unpreventable failures, but there really seems to be an interesting psychological component to the way we expect computers to work flawlessly where we are better at acknowledging the failures of mechanical components. Obviously the failure mode here was not ideal, so hopefully that can be improved. If a throttle cable was jammed it would be the same outcome and at least for me, I can imagine it would make me feel less uneasy. Maybe it's the consistency of code that makes us expect that if one failure exists, more are likely?
- pseudostem 5y agoNo sources, but there were comments here on HN in the past year which pointed out non industrial grade (for the lack of a better word) computers on board a Tesla. My opinion is that with mechanical components it is easier to make a distinction in quality. With computers, we tend to stick to GHz or how many nanometers some tinfoil is.
- wanderer_ 5y ago> non industrial grade (for the lack of a better word) computers on board a Tesla. Such as the non-volatile memory chips that began to fail after irresponsible logging practices [0] [0] https://hackaday.com/2021/02/11/tesla-recalls-cars-with-emmc-failures-calls-part-a-wear-item/ https://hackaday.com/2021/02/11/tesla-recalls-cars-with-emmc...
- bee_rider 5y agoNot sure which computers you mean, or what you mean by "industrial grade," so possibly I'm off-target, but cars could happily have some less reliable computers, for example in the entertainment center. Even stuff like high-level navigation could be run on the entertainment center level computers -- if google maps crashes, it shouldn't cause a human operated car to crash, and a thoughtfully designed "autopilot" system should mimic that split. No idea if the Tesla autopilot system is thoughtfully designed though.
- angryasian 5y agoThis really could be a bigger problem.
- acd10j 5y agoAs per article, Breaks were working but accelerator was not, Why accelerator needs to be connected to main computer and could not be controlled independently without main computer? Access to accelerator/gas is as important in critical situation as the breaks.
- metadat 5y agoAfter having been behind a Tesla emitting smoke on Sand Hill Road, I'm not keen to purchase one anytime soon. When such an event happens, do you think Tesla replaces the battery pack with a fresh, less defective one? Somehow, I doubt it. Stories about Tesla support don't inspire much confidence. Once they have your money, the goodwill and standing by their product is mysteriously absent. With ICE cars being comparatively easy to fix, I'm content to stick with them until the e-kinks get worked out. It's still the early days (easy to forget when Teslas are so ubiquitous in the Bay Area).
- 1stranger 5y agoBecause an ICE vehicle has never caught fire.
- ceejayoz 5y agoElectric cars are a bit harder to extinguish. https://www.motor1.com/news/315476/bmw-i8-fire-reponse-netherlands/ https://www.motor1.com/news/315476/bmw-i8-fire-reponse-nethe...
- sithadmin 5y agoICE vehicle fires are a lot less scary than lithium fires.
- jacquesm 5y agoThat's true, but they are plenty scary and they can happen really fast as well. From 'everything fine' to 'inferno' in less than 10 seconds.
- epgui 5y agoGood point (I'm personally on your side), but what is needed from both EV-cautionary and ICE-cautionary commenters is some odds ratio or data on both, rather than impressionistic and qualitative quips about either.
- s3graham 5y agoI had brake failure in my 2014 Model S, completely unable to stop, and I sailed through a red light before regen slowed me down enough to turn off into a driveway. I know you're thinking it was pedal error or something similar and I would definitely dismiss someone else's story the same way. It was not reproducible. But I am 100% certain that the brakes were not responding even using both feet on the brake. My best guess is that something was unexpectedly frozen given the outside temperature at the time. [ I still later traded it in and bought a new Y though, lacking better EV options at the time. /shruggie ]
- jacquesm 5y agoWow, so the mechanics failed but the electrical part still worked. That's pretty shocking, it should have been the other way around every time. I'm trying to think of how the brake system could have been designed that this would even be possible, the only thing that I can imagine is that a dual piston master cylinder had one of the pistons freeze solid so that the whole system failed to move. But that should be pretty much impossible. One of the disadvantages of regenerative brakes is that if you use them well that you will end up using your hydraulic brakes less than normal which can cause the pistons to seize (and which is an expensive repair if they don't free up by themselves), did the brakes function normally prior to this or did you not use them for a long time?
- s3graham 5y agoIt hadn't been driven in a couple days, and it was slightly below 0 C. So I guess it's possible something froze, but it wasn't excessively cold out. I am mostly a one-pedal/regen driver, but the brakes had to have been working a few days prior because the car doesn't fully stop without using the hydraulic brakes to go from low speed -> stopped. But after low speed testing in the parking lot I turned into I couldn't reproduce any failure so I barely had anything to report that would have been credible. I also learned that you can't slam on the parking break (what I would have called an emergency brake in other cars!) because it's software-disabled above very low speeds.
- 5y ago
- jjulius 5y agoI'm dumbfounded by people dismissing this article by saying that it wasn't "stuck" simply because the brakes worked. The turn signals didn't work, neither did hazards, the failure of which means the driver can't communicate to others that there is a major issue with his vehicle, nor that he is about to perform certain maneuvers such as lane changes or sudden slow downs. It also suggests that the vehicle was maintaining a steady 83 MPH. Whether or not you can brake to slow it down and come to a stop isn't the point; the car is insisting it is going to drive at a specific speed unless you tell it otherwise, that's absolutely not OK and yeah, that's technically "stuck". You've also got the additional damage that occurs by hitting your brakes when the motor is still trying to make it go 83 MPH.
- nathan_phoenix 5y agoYeah, interesting how people on HN sometimes really get stuck on technicalities...
- epgui 5y agoThe words we use matter, because they're how we build a shared understanding of the world. I'm guessing, based mostly on how I feel, that people aren't so much annoyed at the negative Tesla news: people are mostly annoyed that the problem description in the title is misleading, and that you have to read the contents of the article with some care to understand what actually happened. It's objectively sloppy/bad journalism, and I think the only question is "how much does it matter". I'd argue it matters a lot in the context of a news aggregator: we should be able to find a more accurate, less misleading, or less impressionistic piece of journalism on this subject. This shouldn't be understood as a cry for "nothing to see here" or "fake news"... On the contrary, it still looks bad for Tesla. Let's just make sure we're focused on accurate wrongs.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- bin_bash 5y agoWe're pointing out the issue isn't nearly as bad as what the headline states. That doesn't imply there isn't a problem.
- MrWiffles 5y agoOnly short 5MPH. GREAT SCOTT!
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- bm-rf 5y agofun fact, on the Model S (2016), before tesla removed solitaire while driving, you could reliably crash the infotainment computer if you dragged the cards around fast enough. Actually, just tapping very fast could do it too. The car would still drive (headlights on, accelerator and breaks worked) but no turn signals. fun prank as the passenger :)
- SkittyDog 5y agoFor all those people calling it a clickbait headline... You're not wrong the headline is a deliberate scare tactic. At the same time... While Tesla is marketing it's "Full Self Driving" terminology, I'm actually glad that someone else is also using misleading language to grab attention, and remind the public that the state of the art is still quite limited.
- oceliker 5y agoI thought I remembered reading something similar a while ago (except for the speed being stuck), a quick google yields quite a few similar cases: https://www.google.com/search?q=tesla+computer+shutdown+while+driving&oq=tesla+computer+shutdown+while+driving https://www.google.com/search?q=tesla+computer+shutdown+whil...
- KyleJune 5y agoI've had my screen freeze once before while on the highway. I did a soft reset to be able to restore it but it took about a minute. I was still able to drive, speed up, and slow down while the screen wasn't working but I could only guess how fast I was driving without the screen displaying it.
- gentle 5y agoIt's amazing to me how there are so many Tesla Stan's on HN that any time any article gets posted that is in any way critical of Musk or Tesla it immediately gets flagged and booted from the site.
- epgui 5y agoThese articles are often inaccurate or misleading. I'm not suggesting Tesla is beyond reproach (in fact I believe in the importance of high accuracy of criticism, so we can focus on the bad things that matter), but negative Tesla news does attract clicks, so it shouldn't be surprising that the quality of negative Tesla news tends to be lower than the quality of positive or neutral Tesla news.
- tyrfing 5y agoWhere "high quality positive news" is a tweet of a drone video, and "low quality negative news" is an LA Times article about ridiculous racism at Tesla.
- epgui 5y agoThe words you're putting in my mouth don't reflect my feelings or beliefs. Don't put words in other people's mouths. --- See: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html > Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community. > Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.