Tesla stops cybertruck deliveries—accelerator pedal may be to blame
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It baffles me to this day that those sharp hood/headlight corners passed any kind of safety muster.
Beyond human error itself, a suddenly accelerating Cybertruck seems a likely candidate for "sudden pedestrian impalement".
Beyond human error itself, a suddenly accelerating Cybertruck seems a likely candidate for "sudden pedestrian impalement".
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To my knowledge, not a airliner single accident has had a fly-by-wire flight control system as the root cause. The planes I fly don't have a single mechanical linkage from the flight controls to the flight surfaces. They're safer (by design and statistically) than earlier generations anyway.
Fly-by-wire is a good way to lower construction cost, but it also lowers operating costs since there's less mechanical stuff like pulleys and cables that can fail, and thus needs maintenance. Also, different size aircraft can be given similar handling characteristics by tweaking the software. That's why the A330 and A350 are very similar to hand fly.
The MAX does not have fly-by-wire.
Airliners don't have ejection seats. We still good.
Of note is that airliners also brake-by-wire, nosewheel-steer-by-wire, and engine-control-by-wire. Engine control was the first component to go fully digital.
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I’m just impressed someone could make a cyber truck look worse. I did nazi that coming.
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Sounds quite similar to this issue that allegedly got an employee sacked for embezzlement. You can't make this up
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cg3q95ednqwo
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cg3q95ednqwo
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Er, my 1990s era Land Rover's accelerator had no physical connection to the engine. It was purely fly-by-wire to the ECU. That was brought in with the TDi300 and went on the TD5, which I had. I was quite involved in the UK Land Rover world in those days and while many muttered into the beer (including me, if I'm honest) about this new-fangled thing, I never heard of single failure.
Now the fact that they put the control wires for each of the five injectors into the rocker cover, bathed in hot oil, was a different matter. It was common to hear of oil making its way through the wiring loom into the ECU under the driver's seat, and strange misfires under acceleration were due to this odd design decision.
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This car is meant for the deregulated US market. Leaving the unpopular size aside, this kid-obliterating machine is never going to be allowed to roam the streets of Europe. The angled corners and structural stiffness are just too dangerous.
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Yes it does, on the spoilers. Those are also part of the MCAS system. It's debatable whether that would qualify as a 'root cause', but it's not debatable that the MCAS computer was responsible for those crashes. Now whether that wrong signal traveled down a mechanical cable or electronic wire is probably immaterial - the pilot was being overridden by the computer and that's almost certainly the thing people are concerned about in fly-by-wire systems.
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The US market is hardly deregulated. It is, however, regulated to only protect the purchaser of the vehicle and literally nobody else.
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It's not that hard to design reliable, failure resistant things. But it is fairly uninteresting, somewhat expensive, and will constrain your design envelope - all things that Musk hates.
There's a bit of a societal problem of being infatuated with exciting engineering rather than good engineering. This has been a problem within the tech industry, but doesn't reflect the whole industry - there's a lot of really high quality engineering in tech. SpaceX is one of the difficult ones to pin down. Falcon 9 is clearly good engineering. Starship so far has been more exciting than good, and we'll see if they make that transition.
But Musk has two blind spots there (insights from students I sent to work for him in early SpaceX):
1) he has an internal bias of what things he considers easy and hard. Civil engineering to him is easy, so if a civil engineer says 'you need to do this' he's inclined to ignore them and do it how he wants (Starship launchpad). Social media was easy, so you get Twitter. Industrial engineering is easy, so you get Tesla manufacturing quality. But a lot of aerospace he considers hard, so he listens to his engineers and you get SpaceX engines, etc.
2) he finds engineering design interesting and engineering production boring. So when he's making 1-100 of something, he engages well with that, because it involves a lot of individual attention per product. When he's making a million of something, and the focus is on quality control as a policy rather than as an individual effort, that's not interesting to him and gets discounted. Basically, he's a hacker rather than a software engineer. Making cars means spending most of your time writing unit tests and refining your deployment system, not clever algorithms. He only likes the clever algorithm part of it, so you get Cybertruck.
Tesla worked better in the Model S days because the scale was smaller, and the engineers had more control. As scale went up, things started to fall apart, and as he took more control, things got even worse. Because SpaceX is designed to not scale in that way, it's more resilient. Also, NASA/FAA pay a lot closer attention than NTSB and other regulators in the auto industry.
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Being overridden by the computer is usually not the primary concern with fly-by-wire. It’s that failure of the system means no control at all. All the fly by wire systems have a mode that turns off (to the extent practicable) re-interpretation of control movement in determining how to move surfaces.
MCAS is a terrible example to use in any discussion of fly-by-wire given its not fly-by-wire. All control surfaces have a direct mechanical connection to the cockpit, including the trim.
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As far as benefits of steer-by-wire, aside from no hydraulic fluid (mostly an end-of-life benefit) there is also a potential safety improvement. Collapsable steering columns are an old safety advance but those are still a notable factor in crash injuries to the driver. If we can get to steer-by-wire without needing a column for back-up (like the Q50 had) you can do away with the column entirely and reduce driver crash injuries further.
One challenge that sure sounds small but has proven challenging is, when you do away with the steering column the steering lock (when parked) has to be relocated and servo activated or similar (not mechanically linked to an ignition key). The C5 generation Corvette had an attempt at that remote steering lock. Not sure why, since it still had a normal steering column. Maybe it was a production test case. Anyway, it caused a lot of owners grief not unlocking properly on start up. I don't know the percentage of C5's reporting trouble. Probably a single digit percentage but that ended up being a lot of complaints and some tows to a dealer.
One challenge that sure sounds small but has proven challenging is, when you do away with the steering column the steering lock (when parked) has to be relocated and servo activated or similar (not mechanically linked to an ignition key). The C5 generation Corvette had an attempt at that remote steering lock. Not sure why, since it still had a normal steering column. Maybe it was a production test case. Anyway, it caused a lot of owners grief not unlocking properly on start up. I don't know the percentage of C5's reporting trouble. Probably a single digit percentage but that ended up being a lot of complaints and some tows to a dealer.
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Unless I'm on a hill, I use the built-in "creep" to back out of parking spaces. My foot's always on the brake. Although it's easiest with an automatic transmission, you can do it with a manual with a good touch on the clutch (and brake).
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That was the excuse anyway. Not surprisingly, you never seen painted vehicles having that issue.
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araczynski
Ars Scholae Palatinae
All you need to know about the vehicle is that they use SS parts that are so cheap they actually rust. If that cheap-A construction/corner cutting/etc, is acceptable at such a fundamental component, then you might as well enjoy russian roulette.
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The time I had that problem was coming uphill out of a parking garage in reverse. Couldn’t just creep out.
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Oh, come on! Give 'em a break. They can build a good car, but for over a century, car companies haven't been able to overcome the insurmountable engineering challenges of the acceleration pedal. If only they could find a way to make the acceleration pedal, the Cybertruck would be the perfect truck!
My guess is that the problem is firmware. A 400GB firmware update should fix the problem (as long as the accelerator software doesn't conflict with the all-immersive VR headset software or the AR-assisted fellatio robot).
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In general I think the notion of the Aztek as being an obviously unattractive and unloved concept for a car has lost a lot of its power now that we live in a world where almost every new car is a crossover. It might have been abnormal at time of release, but a huge proportion of new car models nowadays clearly follow its lead.
I will boldly predict that the same will not be true of truck models and the Cybertruck in the late 2040s.
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I was under the impression that they aren't painted when they eventually leave Tesla. I'd put good money on this being a custom paint job and not a factory offering.
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All stainless steels can rust. It isn't a matter of "cheapness".
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With apologies to Henry: You can get it in any color you want, as long as it’s brushed stainless steel.
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Though most don't have the same level of care requirements to stop them doing so that the Cybertruck seems to.
That said, it's clearly not designed for people who want a truck to do truck things*, so the sort of people who will buy it can treat it like the fragile flower it is.
* like towing stuff.
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Hope I don't get killed by someone's Tesla "experiencing an acceleration event"
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Note that most modern cars with push button start have a remote electric steering lock. Nissan had a lot of trouble and had to recall the 370Z and GT-R to replace the lock module due to it failing to open because the design used a grease that hardened over time. They came out with at least six models of the lock trying to fix it.
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To my knowledge, not a airliner single accident has had a fly-by-wire flight control system as the root cause. The planes I fly don't have a single mechanical linkage from the flight controls to the flight surfaces. They're safer (by design and statistically) than earlier generations anyway.
Fly-by-wire is a good way to lower construction cost, but it also lowers operating costs since there's less mechanical stuff like pulleys and cables that can fail, and thus needs maintenance. Also, different size aircraft can be given similar handling characteristics by tweaking the software. That's why the A330 and A350 are very similar to hand fly.
The MAX does not have fly-by-wire.
Airliners don't have ejection seats. We still good.
Of note is that airliners also brake-by-wire, nosewheel-steer-by-wire, and engine-control-by-wire. Engine control was the first component to go fully digital.
Also, Fly By Wire has multiple different rationales, even within the air industry; whilst tech fetishists tend to grab any to justify why their consumer product has a feature without understanding the why the original source had it.
In military usage though, Fly By Wire came from two different trends, both involving the aeroplane being unflyable. For performance reasons, a certain amount of twitchy behaviour was seen as desirable, going all the way back to the Sopwith Camel; whose famous snappy, torque-y engine gave you better turning speed in the direction of the engine torque... if you could handle it. The Camel famously offered the choice between "A red cross, a wooden cross, or the Victoria Cross". And of course, every dreams-of-being-a-fighter-pilot believes they'd get the latter. What FBW does is tame the twitchiness so it can be recovered post mid-air jankiness; when people talk about the F-16 having FBW, what you're talking about is an era where fighters are still expected to be close in dogfighters, and being a twitchy but tameable beast will be a good thing... pushing the envelope is desireable.
That changes with the arrival of stealth; missile technology is finally good enough that whilst you might get one crowd pleasing bat-turn in, and dodge one incoming missile, but now you're low and slow and everyone around you is carrying another 3 or more missiles and they won't miss; but now the 'planes are twitchy for a different reason. The early designs which minimize radar returns dont make for very stable or predictable flight patterns. Which is why the F-117 was known as the "Wobblin' Goblin". I don't know if the current generation of stealth planes, with their much more rounded forms, are as bad to fly (and we probably wont know until they're aging out of use) and whether the electronic work load is lessened by modern tech to not get in the way... But you don't in general want the pilot to be fighting his plane as well as the enemy.
Which is part of why modern airliners have FBW; easing pilot work load. But there are different rationales there; you don't want twitchy performance at all. You want smooth flight so passengers can get up and walk about, and you want nice predictable fuel burn to calculate profits per mile, whilst your elegant tube efficiently cuts through the air. Not having the pilots lawn dart the aeroplane into the floor is of course a benefit too, but the reason something like MCAS got to production Boeings and killed so many people was because it wasn't as important as the corporate profit spreadsheets that said hiding the flight envelope from the pilots meant you'd get more sales. A military pilot is expected to know every quirk of their plane, and it's FBW, and abuse it as much as possible to get the edge over an opponent; a commercial pilot (no offence meant to them, or their personal skills) isn't necessarily expected to know everything that's on their commercial plane, and is expected to have prevented the problem long before their possible acrobatic skills are expected to be called into use to get you out of it.
But tech fetishists don't understand that nuance. They just go "Modern tech, fighter tech, I want it on my car, and if it's there, it's great and by extension so am I!" Drive By Wire does have some clear benefits. But cars aren't fighter jets, they're much closer to passenger jets. And you also dont want the drivers of said cars to be treating the roads like modern air combat, nor to have the skills to handle it when it becomes like that.
When Melon Mush however (paraphrased) said "the great thing about the CybertruKKK is you'll demolish anyone you crash into", he was appealing directly to that kind of ignorant assumption as to what driving is actually like. You're an important tech bro; the world is warfare and you need to survive; here's a truck that's a killer. Do you know how to handle it? Who cares! You're the elite, right? You'll get a Victoria Cross for having a CybertruKKK!
Well, more likely an Iron Cross these days, but still.
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I mean, to be fair, most stainless steels aren't exposed to the elements like the Boerwagen is/will be.
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IPunchCholla
Ars Scholae Palatinae
Am I reading that right? The manual basically says if you don’t spot wash your car after every use, it‘s on the owner?
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Depends why you’re buying the truck. If it’s for utility then how it looks doesn’t really matter.
Ugliness is also very subjective. I don’t understand why anyone would buy a lime green Lamborghini (honestly every Lambo I’ve seen is ugly no matter the color), but people do it because they think it looks cool.
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The problem is that it has utility disadvantages when compared to other electric trucks, too.
Why buy this over a Rivian or an F-150 Lightning?
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I was going to post the same story. It's worth quoting a bit for context:
Emphasis added. It's that whole "My office has an open door... directly to your exit from this company" thing.
Tesla went on to accuse her effectively of embezzlement, leading to a lawsuit that is still awaiting its day in court.
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They are much better at cars than at tech. Which says a lot about their tech, to be fair.
They CEO claims they are a robotics and AI company, but they are literally 20 years behind on robots, and they don't seem to be going anywhere on AI either. Their cars might not be great, but they exist, so that puts them more towards car company territory.
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Interestingly living near a major harbour/rail hub I've noticed that when tranporting vehicles (new or used) by rail (ship or trailer) most manufacturers will wrap exposed surfaces ( primarily the hood but also fender grill and doors) in standard car transport wrap - a cheap plastic film with a weak adhesive coating, to protect finish from the elements.
Elon of course thinks the best solution is no solution, and he had of course promised cybertruck would be corrision proof .... So this was an issue Tesla didn't test or think to solve.
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I think an efficiency thing. An electric motor is going to be more efficient than a hydraulic one powered either off the engine through mechanical drive. Or a hydraulic one powered by an electric motor.
So electric assist, or pure steer by wire is going to be more efficient. And for something like FSD, pure steer by wire is probably cheaper and less complicated than rack and pinion with electric assist.
That said, I am down on rack and pinion steering with electrohydraulic assist.
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