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.
I know we talked about this on Discord but I forgot one key fact.
Tesla has an isolated 12V battery pack already. If the 12V battery pack remained isolated (for cabin / windows / sensors / etc. etc.), then all of this could have been easily avoided.
Tesla vehicles aren’t an ICE vehicle. Tesla has innately separate power supplies for power / steering (aka: the main battery pack), and a separate 12V battery pack for other purposes. This isn’t like ICE cars where the 12V line cannot be physically separated from the alternator or other aspects of the vehicle.