
Elon
Please upvote or downvote
An investigation of Tesla power steering problems was this week upgraded to an engineering analysis after initial probing turned up thousands more failures. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) began inspecting power steering failures in 2023 Tesla Model 3 and Y vehicles in late July after receiving 12 …
Woke used to mean something like awareness of racial inequality. Modern usage among Republicans resembles "Social Justice Warrior" but is intended as a dismissive insult. "Woke mind virus" is a direct quote from a Musk tweet implying lack of racism is a contagious delusion.
These days "woke" basically means whatever target for the culture wars conservatives have picked lately. It is one of those things where it can take on whatever thing conservative voters are angry about and/or afraid of without the politician ever having to explicitly say it out loud, so they can always claim that they never said anything racist, chauvinistic, and/or xenophobic. They know full well that's what their supporters will hear, and they're actively relying on that "misunderstanding" but they'll claim they never actually said anything bad.
Well, given that the steering rack is a straight rack and pinion, but Tesla have a permanent magnet brushless motor on a belt reduction ballscrew coupled to the same linear shaft. So if the motor were to cease to drive properly, or if the torque sensor on the steering column were to fail, then the manual steering could be quite inoperable.
That motor can apply significant force to the steering rack, easily enough to overcome most drivers. I've had the Tesla try to get into the wrong* lane before and the force required to overcome the computer was much greater than anticipated (you couldn't do it with one hand, and most people who hold the wheel lightly in two hands would have been surprised).
There's something funky with this setup because normally the steer assist disables with the lightest touch during a lane change.
* When I say "wrong", I mean the feckin' gap in the barrier on a dual carriageway to allow cars to turn right. And there was even a car in the space.
Old cars were light weight, had narrow tires, and they had a lower steering gear ratio. Parking without assistance was difficult but they were drivable. I imagine it would take incredible strength to control a Tesla without power assistance. And the steering wheel would have to be bolted on correctly.
"Old cars were light weight, had narrow tires, and they had a lower steering gear ratio. "
A few decades ago I went to pick up quite a large hire van. I was used to driving those without power steering, bit heavier than the Austin Maxi I had at the time (great car). That time they gave me a new model, so when I pulled hard on the wheel to make a turn when leaving the hire co building I discovered that it had power steering and came close to crashing into the petrol pumps. Fortunately it also had upgraded brakes so I just managed to stop in time. Next time I picked up a van I noticed that another customer had been less lucky and had indeed crashed into the petrol pumps.
Warning the customers about power steering was apparently beyond the wit of these folk.
"all the safety framework"
Since when were crappy plastic trims and decoration safety related? They are small because they've always been small, and smaller now because of all the fluff that Ford will tell you "the customers demand". And yes I can still drive a Fiesta and no, I still can't get my knees under the steering wheel.
Nothing to do with plastic trim, the old cars had plastic trim.
SIPS was introduced by Volvo in 1991 and now every manufacturer has to have a version of it. In addition we now have side airbag integration.
The point was that the exterior dimensions have increased a lot and the interior dimensions not by much. I am 6'2 (188cm) and can sit quite comfortably in a Fiesta drivers seat.
Why would you be taking the family to a saloon?
By American standards, the Fiesta is absolutely tiny. We didn't get the Austin Maxi here, so I looked it up. Yeah, that's a very small car, nothing about it is "large". A standard size American sedan of that era would be the Chevy Impala...
Wheelbase 119 in (3,023 mm)Length 213.2 in (5,415 mm)
Width 79.9 in (2,029 mm)
Height 54.4–56.7 in (1,382–1,440 mm)
And the "Maxi"
Wheelbase 104.75 in (2,661 mm)Length 159 in (4,039 mm)
Width 64 in (1,626 mm)
Height 54.5 in (1,384 mm)
Old cars were light weight, had narrow tires, and they had a lower steering gear ratio
I take it you've never driven a Morris Minor? There's a reason why the steering wheel is huge - a small Mini-style steering wheel wouldn't let you get the leverage required at low speeds..
(I remember having to steer a Citroen XM after it had peed its hydraulic fluid (again) all over the road and the power assistance for steering/brakes/suspension had all disappeared. "Heavy" is too dismissive a word. )
On the Cybertruck the steering is steer by wire. There’s no physical connection between the steering rack and the steering wheel. I don’t know if that’s the same for other models of Tesla, but I’d say it’s highly worrying if they can’t even get the basics right.
The thing that astonishes me is that Tesla gets good ncap scores. How can that be given incidents and recalls of such a serious nature? Or does the same apply to other manufacturers - we just don’t hear about it because Tesla presents as an easy target to the press? Or maybe is it a dieselgate type scandal on the horizon - and Tesla is just good at passing tests.
The other thing is that electric cars are easier to protect against crashes because they don’t have a huge lump of non-deformable metal directly in front of the driver.
Not all have engines at the front, like my trusty Ghia for example.
But, have you ever talked to people of the fire department? Had a pint with some, and they are really, really concerned about electric car fires, which are really, really scary. Not only frequent, but extremely difficult to put out. They told me they would rather see a ban on people loading their cars overnight "close to their house", like near their front door, in their private, or worse, apartment building parking garage, because (their words) it is a disaster waiting to happen.
"Not only frequent..." Citation needed.
Studies (the Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency and Australia’s Department of Defence (EV FireSafe) for example), both show EV fires are far less likely than fires in petrol or diesel cars.
Quote: "....3.8 fires per 100,000 electric or hybrid cars in 2022, compared with 68 fires per 100,000 cars when taking all fuel types into account."
Quote: "...found there was a 0.0012% chance of a passenger electric vehicle battery catching fire, compared with a 0.1% chance for internal combustion engine cars."
The only reason EV fires appear to be common, is they end up as a headline story, whereas petrol or diesel car fires are so common, they are not news worthy unless the fire takes out a whole building, or a ship. There is also a lot of misinformation, where fires have been attributed to EVs, but then found out it was not the case.
Resent examples being the Luton airport multistory car park that turned out to be a diesel, and the Fremantle Highway car transporter ship, where all 498 EVs that were on board were driven off with only minor damage.
"...extremely difficult to put out."
This I'll agree with, but only when it's thermal runaway of the battery pack.
Quote: "....3.8 fires per 100,000 electric or hybrid cars in 2022, compared with 68 fires per 100,000 cars when taking all fuel types into account."
Does that also take the cars' ages into account? A 10-year-old car is probably more likely to go up in flames than a 2-year-old one, but there are few 10-year-old EVs so far.
NCAP is just crash testing, not other mechanical / electronic reliability or safety.
Not any more. There are 4 main areas (see https://www.euroncap.com/en/car-safety/the-ratings-explained/. The 3rd and 4th areas now rely heavily on Autonomous Emergency Braking (AEB) and other electronic assistance technologies. A car can't get a 5-star NCAP rating unless it is "well equipped with comprehensive and robust crash avoidance technology", which is why modern cars are stuffed with driver "aids" which you can't permanently disable. If they can be disabled, the car can't get a 5* rating.
Yup. Look here - CarWow Cybertruck Review
The bit you seek is at 13:20.
I don't think that its necessarily a bad idea - I had a VW back in the day (the day being 30 years ago) where the steering rack failed on the motorway. Which wasn't nice. But any technology can fail, and I'd have thought that it's easier to build redundancy into an electric / electronic system. But… Tesla do seem to be spectacularly bad at executing, and I'd like them to get the basics right before they start trying to innovate with safety.
Other than that, it's an interesting watch - and I love Matt Watson's infectious enthusiasm. He's like an eight year old with a new transformer toy. Which is probably why he likes the Cybertruck. Me? I'm grumpy and old, and I'll take good old fashioned solid build quality and dependability over pointless gadgets any day of the week.
These days a lot of cars use electric steering assist, so they're already dealing with both hardware and software.
I look a little askance at steer-by-wire too, but there are some real advantages. For example, crash safety is easier if you don't have a metal rod poking up into the cabin. Also, one of the bigger challenges in packaging a car is having to place the steering rack where there's a good angle for a shaft to the steering wheel; even things like engine accessories have to be planned around it.
Power steering? What’s that? Never heard of it.
And my Austin 1800 gets twelve hogsheads to the bushel, and that’s the way I likes it.
Seriously though, power steering is automobile 101 stuff and has been since the 1970’s. I certainly hope it’s not software related - like so many other driving bits and pieces, that sort of thing should be its own independent - trusted technology - system.
Had power steering fun just a couple of weeks back when my aux belt snapped on a dual-carriageway at ~60mph.
Only a medium sized motor (Astra) but even at 6'2", a big lad and old enough to remeber non PAS motoring, it shocked me how *much* effort it was to drag that wheel and all the dead hydraulics round for the few mins before I could pull over.
Suppose at least they CAN be steered when the PAS lets go (forearm size permitting).
"Tesla didn't respond to questions from The Register for this story. ®"
I am shocked ... shocked ... to find that Tesla Motors did not jump on this opportunity to explain the many advantages of locking one's steering while driving. In fact, I'm rather surprised they didn't charge extra for the feature.
This is a ridiculous story! The steering is working perfectly on all these cars. I have personally investigated this issue, and I discovered that the owners had let their subscription for steering functionality lapse. We at Tesla can't be expected to provide steering for free.
Love Elon.
... Xitler won't be able to complain about the use of the word "recall" because there's no way you're fixing a manufacturing defect in a steering assembly via an OTA software update.
Once upon a time, I had an old beater pickup truck. It was the middle of winter, the roads weren't especially well plowed, and as I was trying to make a left turn (in the US where we drive on the right side of the road) the engine cut out on me. Naturally there's a car coming towards me that would have trouble stopping because of the poorly plowed roads, and this was back when ABS was still relatively new, so people had to actually stop and think to pump the brakes, which, let's face it, never really happens in these kinds of situations. I had to yank with everything I had to barely coast to a point where I wasn't in danger of being t-boned. Did I mention there was a hill on the street I was trying to turn onto to make things even more exciting? Given there was a mechanical assembly physically attached to the steering wheel, that was an option for me. A drive-by-wire system would have almost certainly resulted in an accident.
"Pumping the brakes is only needed if you want to steer. Otherwise locking the wheels will brake more effectively (on tarmac and snow)."
Pumping the brakes is only needed if you don't care about steering.
With all wheels locked, the car is able to rotate around whichever tyre has the most grip. Hence you might meet some stationary object sideways on - or whichever aspect the car chooses to present to said object.
The CEO has been busy in court defending his $55B compensation package. Along with $44B for Twitter that is $99B from the same judge. According to Forbes he is now in second place, just ahead of Jeff. Clearly the guy has far more important issues to deal with than Tesla drivers being able to steer.
Yes, just *IMAGINE* if any other legacy car company's CEO had kept it business as usual while customers' ability to steer was completely impeded!...oh wait, this has literally happened to every car manufacturer on the planet. You complain about "MONTHS"...how about Toyota's latest that went on over a decade: https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/rcl/2021/RCMN-21E103-0897.pdf
Only took Toyota 15 years to file a recall for this one. Good job guys! I wish this was the only power-steering recall for Toyota cars recently, but sadly, it is not.
This one's up there with the hitting-brakes-causes-car-to-accelerate bug Toyota had, which killed many many people, or the faulty-airbag-deployment-can-kill-you issue. No idea why the ignorant keep claiming that Toyota remains the highest quality car manufacturer, but there ya go. I personally prefer horse/ox/goat buck and buggy for my transport needs. No wasteful and deadly manufacturing processes, no exhaust or noise, and it runs on lunch/grass/brush.
The report you've linked to there only refers to a loss of PAS, not to a complete loss of steering ability. Thus, it's not comparable to the issue facing Tesla here, where in around half of the reported incidents the vehicles were left without ANY ability to be steered.
So no, this literally hasn't happened to every car manufacturer on the planet, and so far you've not been able to provide any evidence of it happening to even just one other manufacturer besides Tesla...
I think the jury is out on whether steering while stationary is particularly bad, and if so whether it is the tyres or steering mechanism that suffers (in general, not specifically Tesla). I don’t simply because that is what I was taught, way back when.
I do remember my Grandad telling me that he drove trucks where you could be wheel-deep in mud and still steer with a little finger. And he was responsible for fixing them too so it probably would not have been maltreatment. Sounds fun :)
What does seem to make sense is that you shouldn’t push against the locks, and preferably back off a smidgeon from the lock position.
Surely the size ought to be defined as the angle subtended by the typeface? Defining it as an absolute size without any reference to the distance between it and the drivers eyes means you could end up with something whos legibility would vary depending on whether it was situated directly in front of the driver within the dash cluster (if your car has been designed by someone who actually cares about the driver and therefore still bothers to put any useful visual feedback in that position), or worse off to one side at the top of the centre console (**Tesla has entered the conversation**), or worse still off to one side and down a bit where the centre console meets the transmission tunnel (or whatever you call that region of the cabin in an EV)...
And "shall be of contrasting colors, one of which is red" - I wonder if that's why Ford, in their infinite wisdom, designed the dash of one of our older cars with red on black indicators... Because, to someone with normal colour vision, that would be considered contrasting, but to my red-green deficient retinas, they were all but impossible to read in certain ambient lighting conditions.
"Tesla...illegally disposing of hazardous waste"
That does seem to be long running and well established issue in the USA, and not just from all, local businesses. I remember horror films back in the 80's where "mutant monsters" were created from toxic waste in the water table so it was clearly already established in the public consciousness (and no I don't mean Marvel or Mutant Turtles type films). Later, there was the Erin Brockovich "based on true events" film, again showing it as a relatively frequent incidence by big businesses. And there are previous US Governments cutting funding for the EPA, one of the depts responsible for policing exactly that sort of incident. I'm hardly surprised that it's still happening.