this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2023
15 points (94.1% liked)

RealTesla

483 readers
1 users here now

  1. Posts must be about Tesla, EV, or AV
  2. Meta Posts must be pre-approved.
  3. Shitposts are limited
  4. No Elon Worship
  5. All Links must include the original title of the Content
  6. Sites behind Paywalls must have text included.
  7. Don't be an asshole
  8. No Image Posts

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

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.

https://www.republicworld.com/world-news/china/tesla-to-assist-police-probe-fatal-model-y-acceleration-incident-in-china-articleshow.html

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] drdabbles 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

...but its important to note that the following 12V line is “normal” case of cars.

This is actually more damning of Tesla, though. The fact this is normal behavior means anybody working in this space should know and would therefore compensate for high and low voltage scenarios. Then consider the fact that the new LiPo 12v battery is only 6.9Ah and you're basically discharging it at 14.5C to get 100A. The relationship of voltage sag to current draw in a LiPo battery isn't exactly unknown science. The Model 3 flooded battery is 45 Ah, and claims to have ~ 400 CCA rating. I'm not sure what the sag would look like there, but based on these crashes I bet it's just as bad.

how does this affect the other parts of the Model 3?

As I mentioned on Discord, if you exposed the FSD computer or even infotainment computer to this kind of huge voltage range, the best outcome would be software crashes because of spurious values in logic circuits. So they clearly knew to compensate for this in the power supplies for these computers. Using simple voltage dividers and op-amps as the reference for the ADCs and then skipping the gain compensation in the DSP is unbelievably lazy.

Worse, IMO, is the fact that TI calls out that you should either design or use a voltage reference generator, of which they offer several compatible with the DSP. Two seconds on the site and I found REF34-Q1 which is an automotive grade component with a cut off voltage of Vout + 50mV. And of course the design guide, data sheet, and other documentation describe how to best use this component in an automotive environment. In other words, this is lazy software and lazy hardware design when there are countless reference designs available.

Of course, the fact that so many systems run from this same 12v line on the inverter boards calls into question how they are properly isolated and protected from such dramatic voltage drops. You've got CAN, LIN, the FET drivers, etc. all running off this same rail. When the inverter boards started blowing up, I assumed it was because Tesla wrote a unified firmware for controlling new and old FETs and they were perhaps overdriving some of them and causing them to blow. But now I'm wondering if there isn't something rooted in hardware causing the issue. If the AC compressor or PAS cause large voltage swings, is it possible that this is causing another reference somewhere to be incorrect which in turn causes FETs to switch improperly and blow each other up? There's a lot of field and position sensors in the drive units, so I could see this happening more now than ever before.

[–] SteWi 2 points 1 year ago

It's totally crazy how tesla uses the ADC on a safety critical component!

The question if the ADC's reference voltage is stable (enough) is a pretty basic one in any design.

I hope this goes public enough that tesla is forced to change/recall the affected components (at least in europe).