EDIT: This PDF contains very detailed electrical information for the EEs who wanna go through the complaint: https://www.autoevolution.com/pdf/news_attachements/breaking-nhtsa-petition-shows-tesla-s-sudden-unintended-acceleration-is-real-and-curable-217525.pdf
Last year at /r/RealTesla, a Chinese video of a car rocketing at full speed for 1+ minutes before crashing / killing a pedestrian made the rounds. We all recognized it as one of the weirder cases of “Sudden Unintended Acceleration”, and I think that particular video really changed some minds.
While a lot of SUA events are from driver-error, it began a search into why Teslas seemed to be getting more SUA above-and-beyond the industry normal. This investigation (now filed under NHTSA) suggests that the ADC could be miscalibrated during a load-dump (or other electrical surge-like) scenario.
If the ADC associated with the accelerator pedal is off, then the Tesla will have the pedal at the wrong level of acceleration until the next calibration event, which is not going to happen until over a minute later.
This is extremely similar to that Chinese runaway Tesla, and perfectly seems to explain it. I’m glad that someone seems to have gotten to the bottom of this.
At /r/RealTesla, we’ve been following this SUA problem for literally years.
A lot of us thought it was just the typical “stupid driver” pedal problem (Ex: Toyota’s SUA turned out to be just a bunch of people confusing the pedals). A lot of us thought it was due to one-pedal driving (training the Tesla drivers to confuse the pedals).
Turns out it was the hardware this whole time.
Given the level of detail, reverse engineering, and electrical knowledge in this .pdf, I really don’t see how Tesla survives this. They’re on the hook for many dozens of deaths already, if this .pdf is true.