Feds say no have to recall Tesla’s one-pedal driving regardless of petition

The last petition regarding Teslas and sudden unintended acceleration involved claims regarding a voltage spike in the car’s inverter. Not so here—Costas Lakafossis presented NHTSA with a lengthy white paper that tries to prove that human error isn’t the problem but that there are instead “very specific patterns that repeat themselves in almost every one of these SUA accidents, all pointing to the same cause of possible confusion and the same lack of appropriate pre-emptive measures in the programming of the Human-System Interface of modern self-driving cars.”

Essentially, because a driver doesn’t need to hold down the brake pedal when starting a Tesla, its driver might put a foot on the accelerator by mistake, Lakafossis claimed, thus explaining about 200 incidents in which Teslas have crashed into garage walls or other parked cars. But as Lakfafossis noted in his petition, NHTSA has already determined that all of those crashes were driver error, and that’s the case today as well. One-pedal driving is common across the industry, NHTSA said, and adding the equivalent of a brake transmission interlock to 2.3 million Teslas will not happen.

FSD probe deepens

Thursday was a less good day for Tesla’s relationship with NHTSA. Yesterday, NHTSA expanded a “preliminary analysis” into an “engineering analysis”—i.e., a more thorough investigation—into Tesla’s vision-only “FSD” system. Without a second sensor modality to rely on—virtually all other automakers use radar and sometimes lidar, too—Tesla wrote software to detect if the camera feeds were too degraded to rely upon. Should this be the case, the driver would be notified to take control. That’s the idea, at least.

NHTSA said it’s worried that the system “fails to detect and/or warn the driver appropriately under degraded visibility conditions such as glare and airborne obscurants.” After reviewing nine crashes, the agency said “the system did not detect common roadway conditions that impaired camera visibility and/or provide alerts when camera performance had deteriorated until immediately before the crash occurred.” NHTSA also said the number of linked crashes may be underreported, and it is adding six more incidents to the analysis.

If NHTSA finds an engineering defect, Tesla could be forced to recall more than 3.2 million vehicles.