The NHTSA has officially concluded that incidents involving Tesla vehicles where drivers claimed that the vehicles were “accelerating by themselves” were caused by user errors.
After receiving a petition citing 127 claimed incidents last year, the NHTSA began looking into claims of self-accelerating Tesla vehicles. Although several claims of unintended acceleration were publicized, the EV giant claimed that vehicle logs shows user error by pressing the wrong pedal as the culprit.
Tesla soon after published the results of its internal investigation showing it has concluded that there was no truth to some units suffering spontaneous acceleration. Furthermore, Tesla claimed that the petition with NHTSA was started by a TSLA short seller. Tesla is currently dealing with a similar investigation after new claims surfaced of a Model 3 accelerating by itself in China. The most recent claim resulted in multiple injuries and two fatalities.
Today, the NHTSA’s Office of Defects Investigation (ODI) reveled that the results of its investigation lined up with the automakers own investigation showing the cause of sudden unintended acceleration to be “pedal misapplication.”
According to the report: “After reviewing the available data, ODI has not identified evidence that would support opening a defect investigation into SUA in the subject vehicles. In every instance in which event data was available for review by ODI, the evidence shows that SUA crashes in the complaints cited by the petitioner have been caused by pedal misapplication. There is no evidence of any fault in the accelerator pedal assemblies, motor control systems, or brake systems that has contributed to any of the cited incidents. There is no evidence of a design factor contributing to increased likelihood of pedal misapplication. The theory provided of a potential electronic cause of SUA in the subject vehicles is based upon inaccurate assumptions about system design and log data.”
For all the details check out the entire report below: