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?
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.
I’m kind of amazed people tolerated this for so many hours. Traffic stoppage costs can really add up.
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?
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.
I’m guessing by extremely unfortunate luck both batteries failed at the same time.
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 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.
Low quality mechanics is the norm in 70000 vehicles because of greed. Not technology issues. A decent hand break is known to humanity.
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...
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.
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...
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.
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.
https://uploads.tff-forum.de/original/3X/d/7/d7427f37fb68ce3...
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.
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.
In nine hours they couldn't throw on some wheel chocks and push it out of the way?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
And 9 hours? They could have called one of those tow trucks who haul away an illegally parked vehicle in a matter of seconds.
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.
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.
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.
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.
