Tesla breaks down mid-turn and causes more than nine hours of travel chaos
telegraph.co.ukRunning out of fuel is something it’s obviously “easy” to do with other cars.
But I’m surprised that the electronics have _no_ power redundancy, there isn’t a manual release for the parking break, and running out of power causes the parking break to fail-closed?
There seems to be some discrepancy as the article mentions that it ran out of power, but the owner, Mr Grigg, 57, said that the vehicle had failed despite having shown that it had several miles of charge remaining.
And yes, I'm surprised that an important component doesn't have a manual override. Imagine if the vehicle blocked access to a hospital or a busy bridge or tunnel.
Fire Department would just drag it away without thinking twice.
I’m kind of amazed people tolerated this for so many hours. Traffic stoppage costs can really add up.
In New York, sure. In Salisbury? I'm not even sure the fire engines are equipped for that kind of activity, and I'm almost certain the fire service isn't prepared for the liability.
Good point. I really don’t know what the laws would be like there. I just assumed that a fire department would be capable of dragging a sedan and likely immune to liability if they decided it was a public safety issue.
I checked, and they can move vehicles in a situation where failing to act could cause "one or more individuals to die, be seriously injured or become seriously ill."
Just hit it with fire truck out of the way
What liability arises from removing a vehicle blocking a public road for hours?
> But I’m surprised that the electronics have _no_ power redundancy,
They do. All the auxilliary stuff is on a 12V bus just like on any other car, powered by a separate 12V battery. I don't know anything about the parking break per se, but this isn't remotely as simple as "the car can't be towed when the main battery is dead". We know that's not correct; this is hardly the first Tesla to run out its battery, you can find people doing this deliberately on youtube as a test!
It's some other failure that locked the brake. And it's unique enough to be notable, and it's a Tesla, so of course it's going to spend the day on the front page of HN while we all endure the incessant tut-tutting of the hacker class who think the bug is much simpler than it is.
Folks, disabled vehicles block roads all the time. Stuff breaks. Cars are complicated. Why do we not care if it's a Renault or Suzuki?
Teslas have a number of features designed to prevent this situation from happening.
Below a threshold, the car's power will reduce as battery capacity decreases.
The car will also warn you several times with a modal over the entire display telling you that you're approaching zero capacity.
If you're following a route on the navigation system, it will show you a banner just above the turn by turn instructions indicating whether you need to charge or drive below a set average speed in order to reach the destination.
Additionally, there is a small reserve within the battery that allows you to stretch your remaining capacity just a bit.
The issue here (and I blame Tesla more than the driver) is that showing remaining battery capacity in miles is horrifically inaccurate, just like it is with petrol-fueled vehicles.
Percent state of charge is always the most accurate measure to go on, just like it is on phones.
I also wish Tesla would allow drivers to disable percent remaining until a threshold is reached (like 20%) to reduce capacity anxiety.
indeed - I would have thought a separate battery to run the cabin and safety features would be a good idea. I would only have to be 1/100th the size of the motor batteries.
This is the way it works, the high voltage battery is used for the motors and to feed the 12 volt battery which feeds cabin electronics.
I’m guessing by extremely unfortunate luck both batteries failed at the same time.
Safety-wise it's better option.
Breaking vs just rolling without working brakes.
And I really do not like trend of making brakes drive-by-wire instead of mechanical just to (presumably) save few pennies...
The Tesla Model 3 brakes are hydraulic and the pedal is still mechanically connected to the master cylinder. It’s the parking brake which is electronically actuated, as it is with nearly all modern ICE cars.
Isn’t the 12V battery responsible for that? It sounds like the driver lost that somehow, not the main battery.
Is it? What if it runs out of power at 70mph in the middle of a motorway? I’d have thought sudden breaking would have been the most dangerous thing to do
It shouldn't be as emergency stops can be performed at any point in time - usually when there's an emergency. Obviously it's important that following drivers have left enough space so that they can react in time, but that's down to their driving skill (or lack of, if they're too close).
I'd consider that autonomous vehicles should apply the brakes if they find themselves in an uncertain situation as reducing speed is going to minimise any impact. However, this was being driven acoustically and the handbrake shouldn't have been applied automatically by the power running out. At the worst, if a handbrake fails and can't be used, you can always shove a couple of bricks under the wheels to stop the vehicle rolling.
Maximum braking on an empty highway is still quite dangerous.
The problem about “yeah well they should have left space” or “they should have responded perfectly to a car that’s suddenly braking” is that it’s not realistic to the real world. It’s not a least-surprise event.
I'm not sure about the laws there, but in Austria for example it's also illegal to suddenly break without reason.
wonder if the pendulum will shift back to mechanical components being cheaper than the electrical alternatives with the ever increasing demand for electrical components.
There is enough battery to put it into tow mode after you "run out". Assuming he either didn't know how or perhaps you can even run through that in service mode.
Running of electricity is incredibly difficult on an EV. Also, in what way does a parking brake or a transmission prevent towing? You lift the car onto the tow truck bed like any other tow job. It doesn't take nine hours to hire one that can do the job.
They might not have had such flat bed tow trucks. They aren’t super common outside d cities.
yeah its a problem that comes up regularly, fails and can’t be rolled away. probably need legislation because so many ev fanboys pretend this isnt a problem. (i am an ev fanboy)
Cars break down all the time but at least they can be moved to the side of the road. Are Teslas not able to be moved once they run out of juice? They’re heavy and even with a few folks pushing from the back, is it able to disengage the parking brake?
From the fine article:
> The handbrakes of electric cars, and some other modern cars, are controlled electronically, unlike those of traditional petrol and diesel cars, which are mechanical. This means that the handbrake often locks when the power fails and the car cannot be pushed or towed.
This sounds like a major oversight by Tesla as there should be some override in case a vehicle breaks down in a dangerous position or is blocking something important.
They can be towed, but it is correct that certain electrical failures can prevent the brakes from being released.
I know because this happened to me. The tow company sent a flat bed truck and used a winch to pull the car onto the platform.
It’s pretty annoying from a design perspective but it also seems like something that any competent tow company should be able to handle easily.
Aren’t breaks disabled once the winch pulls on the hook point?
Not disabled, just overpowered. The winch can easily drag a car with locked up wheels. Very common in fact, e.g. automatic transmission that won't shift out of park, or handbrake malfunction, etc etc etc
EVs can’t be towed with a winch style tow truck, at least without frying them. A flat bed tow truck is required (also recommended for many newer ICEs).
That is an unhelpful quote. Yes, some cars have electronic parking brakes. It is quite common on new cars today. But they typically require being affirmatively commanded to change between their applied and unapplied states. Nothing about the general existence of electronic parking brakes explains why this particular vehicle would have one engaged mid-turn.
> Nothing about the general existence of electronic parking brakes explains why this particular vehicle would have one engaged mid-turn.
Did you notice the part that it run out of battery mid-turn? It seems that the brakes are designed to fail safe in case of a battery failure. I see how someone could argue for that as a design choice. The fact that there is no way to emergency release them without power is more questionable.
Sorry, but it doesn't make sense why a Tesla would apply the parking brake when the big battery dies, since the separate 12V battery would power the brake mechanism. If that 12V also happened to die at the same moment (highly unlikely), the parking brake would have been stuck in the released position, not applied.
And 9 hours? They could have called one of those tow trucks who haul away an illegally parked vehicle in a matter of seconds.
"Fail safe" is slamming on the brakes on a power failure? I heard a funny story about a guy who was used to chewing while driving and he'd open the door a crack to spit. Apparently some cars engage brakes if a door opens and he was driving his son's new Jeep going 50 mph.
Other vehicles don't work this way. That's why it seems to be a strange design choice.
It seems the wrong choice to me as a handbrake can be emulated by shoving some bricks under the wheels, and a non-movable vehicle could cause serious issues for other people.
Other car models have handbrakes and/or can be left in a gear that locks the wheels.
They should have called a parking enforcement truck that carries rollers that attach to the locked wheels, they could have moved the car pretty quickly.
My diesel and my wife's petrol card both have electronic handbrakes. I'm not sure what would happen if either has a battery failure.
Most electronic handbrakes just push out a cam against the rotor. Most designs have a way to back the cam out with a wrench or tool.
However sometimes access can be ridiculous I believe BMW's release requires you digging around in the rear seating area for a socket to put a allen-key like shaft into to ultimately back it out. Some vehicles you'd have to jack up a corner to ultimately back it out.
It can vary widely from manufacturer to manufacturer, so it's unlikely something a recovery service would know off-hand since in general a "stuck" parking brake (or automatic transmission parking pawl) is an edge case situation for them.
If the power failed on most vehicles with electronic parking brakes while you were driving, you wouldn’t have the parking brake applied. And it would remain that way. As there wouldn’t be any power to rotate the mechanism into the applied position.
No, but a situation that happened right outside my home is someone too busy looking at their phone bashed their BMW 3-series into the curb and utility pole, and then decided to put the automatic transmission in park before they got out of the vehicle.
And when they got back in, they were unable to remove it from park and put it in neutral.
The previous model you would’ve apparently been able to remove some center console trim on the transmission tunnel and insert the key into a covered keyhole to release the parking pawl. On this newer generation? Jack the car up, get underneath, remove an access panel, and then use a wrench to back out the parking pawl. What a pain in the ass.
Normal turbocharged 4-popper, not a hybrid or a BEV. Once it was put in park after a crash, car decided it was game over.
It was ultimately dragged up onto a flatbed, probably partially flatspotting the tires in the process. The guy sent by AAA had no intention (or the equipment) to safely jack up the car on a busy street to remove the pawl, and probably didn’t even want to even if he knew what to do.
You can still tow it even with the handbrake on, just drag it.
My understanding is that many/most modern cars [0] have an electronic parking brake, and soon enough all of them will.
Of course, a headline such as “car with electronic handbrake breaks down mid-turn…” wouldn’t have had the same clickability. I’m shocked - shocked! - to find a “news” organization sacrificing truth for outrage!
[0] E-handbrakes aren’t a great fit to a manual transmission (or are they?) but I suspect the days of manual transmissions are numbered: electric cars no more need a manual transmission than they need a buggy whip.
On the other hand there are also numerous premium ICE cars which, if they break down in a specific way, can’t be placed into neutral without appropriate tools. This isn’t a new EV thing.
California CHP would have pushed it off the road with the bull bar.
This is not about electric power it's about electric hand breaks.
Low quality mechanics is the norm in 70000 vehicles because of greed. Not technology issues. A decent hand break is known to humanity.
brakes
In a way it’s both.
Does roadside assistance (AAA, etc) not offer some kind of "I ran out of gas" service for electric cars?
Edit: As of 2022, AAA actually does have emergency mobile charging. But of course, only in select cities. https://newsroom.aaa.com/2022/12/electrifying-aaa-member-ben...
They do (I've seen photos of assistance service cars with a bunch of batteries tacked on in the back), but it's a very new thing and not very common yet.
Also the assistance service cars are mostly petrol based still, but even for electric ones I've been told it's non-trivial to wire the existing batteries out (… safety mechanisms and whatnot), making extra battery packs the go-to.
> making extra battery packs the go-to
I mean we are not talking about charging the vehicle to full. You only need like a hand portable battery to jump start the low voltage system.
The procedure is described in the owner's manual: "In the unlikely event that Model 3 loses electrical power, you cannot access the touchscreen and are therefore unable to release the parking brake without first jump starting (see Jump Starting)."[1]
And the jump starting procedure is described here: https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/model3/en_au/GUID-3567D5F...
1: https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/model3/en_au/GUID-3DFFB07...
Jump starting might've helped in this specific scenario, but I'd assume there are other scenarios where you need a minute or two of electrical power in the vehicle, maybe to move itself out some stupid situation or get it un-stuck…
Slightly ironic that the jumpstart instructions differ depending on the type of battery. And the way to determine which type of battery you have is by using the touchscreen (which of course wouldn’t work if your battery is dead)
Last year I had the opposite problem!
Ended up stranded on a motorway less than 2 miles from home in a Tesla Model X. The Supercharger I'd planned on using was down due to a regional power outage, and even though the dash indicated I'd make it, the charge vanished quicker than I'd expected.
It was a cold night, which probably didn't help with the battery drain. Had to pull over on an uphill incline and activated "tow mode" just before the car's display went off, as i'd worried they wouldn't be able to move the car. However, this meant I had to keep my food on the brake pedal to stop it rolling backwards and it's surprisingly tough to keep the car stationary on a slope with a brake pedal that's no longer power-assisted.
Ended up waiting a good hour and a half for recovery, foot stuck on this heavy brake the whole time. It's moments like these you really miss a manual handbrake. High-tech is all well and good until you're left stuck on the side of the motorway, in the cold winter.
They have a separate 12V battery that I imagine runs things like the handbrake, steering lock etc. Just like any other modern car. Probably some electrical failure in the 12V system.
Nitpicking: Modern Tesla Model 3 have 16V batteries (and subsequently also 16V "sigarette igniter" connection instead of 12V)
Unanswered: Why did it take 9 hours to move it?
This is imo the real question.
I would have just instantly grabbed some go jacks / wheel dollies like some repo men use to get cars.
Jack up all the wheels and roll it to the side.
There is also the option to just tow the car.
https://uploads.tff-forum.de/original/3X/d/7/d7427f37fb68ce3...
"The Tesla Model 3 Performance is a four-wheel-drive electric car with a starting cost of £57,000 and a battery life of 41 hours."
From the article, I had no idea battery life was measured in hours, I don't even know how that would work for a car.
I had no idea battery life was measured in hours
It’s not. I know a lot about EVs and I’ve owned a Tesla myself for years, and I don’t know what they’re talking about.
Yeah, no clue either. It doesn't line up with the kWh value of the packs either (82kWh iirc)
"This means that the handbrake often locks when the power fails and the car cannot be pushed or towed."
In nine hours they couldn't throw on some wheel chocks and push it out of the way?
9 hours? Nobody had an extension cord?
Or, as someone else mentioned, a towing service with a flatbed and a winch.
I assume the roads were blocked by traffic, we have narrow A roads in Britain.
Or a portable generator?
How is this even legal? They should have just hooked it up and dragged it into the ditch.
ya this seems like some over politeness by road crews / law enforcement.
Excellent plot device for a crime or spy movie!
Why is this even news? How often does “any” car break down across the UK or USA or Europe and cause a traffic jam?
I’ll answer this question, because the media hates Elon Musk and deeply desires that Tesla fails. Despite Tesla pushing forward the “green agenda” and hence liberal left movement more than any other single company or person.
I have a feeling the New York Times, Guardian etc, would be drinking champagne if Tesla went bankrupt. I don’t understand it honestly.
Good point, I remember the smear campaign against a french car manufacturer for its cruise control (“I couldn’t stop it anymore, it went 200km/h through the toll booth” and 2-3 similar), when clearly it must have been competitors hyping or mounting an incident.
But Musk was popular in late-2021. It’s when he became the world’s first individual fortune in early-2022 that he started to be described as a stupid person. Why?
Some of us have been Elon-sceptical for rather longer than that.
Why do you think this is being politicised?
The Telegraph is often referred to as The Torygraph due to its fandom of the Conservative Party and is generally right wing biased. As I'm not a fan of it, I had a look for other sources and found The Sun (also right wing) and The Daily Mail (infamously right wing and often referred to as The Daily Heil due to their support of Hitler and Nazism before WWII).
Personally, I'm a lefty cyclist and so tend to notice a lot of car related stories where they end up being driven into houses, shops, walls, schools etc. and the UK press doesn't seem biased against Teslas in my view though that might well be different if they were allowed to be driven "autonomously" over here.
People run out of gas and cause chaos on their local roads all of the time. Nothing to see here.
It’s amazing that this is considered “news”. My ex owned a Volvo S40 that had an electric wheel lock that failed in a way that required the car to be dragged onto a flatbed. Car refused to unlock the wheel or switch into neutral gear when the key was inserted.
Failures cause cars to be stuck all the time. The issue here was the failed response, not the failed car.
Doubly embarrassing that HN thinks this is front page worthy. It’s pure unintellectual click/rage-bait. Oh no, look what those gosh darn Teslas are doing now!
The human fear of new technology is the only remarkable thing about this story. That, and perhaps, the fact that some place in the UK couldn’t find a tow truck with a winch for 9 hours to clear a busy highway.
It's not 2010. Back in the days this type of error (as well as speed regulator not disengaging...) happened often in low-quality cars. Nowadays, it seems like even 'luxury' cars are low-quality, and Tesla, for better or for worse, started the trend.
BMW famously degraded the quality of their parts to squeeze out every last dollar of margins. They pushed the envelope too far in putting plastics in place of metal engine parts, and has one of the worse reliability ratings because of it.
Tesla certainly didn’t start the trend, nor is there strong evidence that they are even following that trend. We’ll need to wait another few years to see how things play out with Model 3 / Model Y to know the long-term reliability, but after 5 years, Model 3 owners rate their own cars very highly in the long running Bloomberg study [1]
[1] - https://archive.is/dagIR
Sorry, you're right, I misspoke. I'm sorry, I meant 'tesla is the poster child of that trend' because Tesla is the most marketed car in the world (Elon is a genius at advertising),and the yoke, the misfired alignment, the lack of physical buttons are representative of the trend.
Also, sorry if it come as snark, but every consumer-grade car I drove in the US was uncomfortable imho (mostly rentals). Too high clearence, no feeling 'it' when taking a turn too fast, not feeling the road at all. Model 3 being quite lower than 99% of the cars I drove in the US, I'm pretty sure I would rate it highly. I still think it would be a far shittier experience than my old Xantia (best car I ever drove, and I'm including a sport BMW with sequential drive that could 0-140 in 5s)