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Tesla breaks down mid-turn and causes more than nine hours of travel chaos
- hw 3y agoCars 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?
- ndsipa_pomu 3y agoFrom 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.
- zizee 3y agoMy diesel and my wife's petrol card both have electronic handbrakes. I'm not sure what would happen if either has a battery failure.
- MrFoof 3y agoMost 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.
- kube-system 3y agoIf 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.
- MrFoof 3y agoNo, 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.
- cle 3y agoThey 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.
- eastbound 3y agoAren’t breaks disabled once the winch pulls on the hook point?
- seanmcdirmid 3y agoEVs 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).
- HPsquared 3y agoNot 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
- kube-system 3y agoThat 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.
- krisoft 3y ago> 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.
- ndsipa_pomu 3y agoIt 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.
- pulvinar 3y agoSorry, 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.
- peteradio 3y ago"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.
- 3y ago
- Saris 3y agoYou can still tow it even with the handbrake on, just drag it.
- fuzzbazz 3y agoOther 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.
- simondotau 3y agoOn 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.
- wesleyd 3y agoMy 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.
- whalesalad 3y agoCalifornia CHP would have pushed it off the road with the bull bar.
- cj 3y agoDoes 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-benefits/ https://newsroom.aaa.com/2022/12/electrifying-aaa-member-ben...
- eqvinox 3y agoThey 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.
- krisoft 3y ago> 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-3567D5F4-A5F4-4323-8BE0-023D5438FFC6.html https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/model3/en_au/GUID-3567D5F... 1: https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/model3/en_au/GUID-3DFFB071-C0F6-474D-8A45-17BE1A006365.html https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/model3/en_au/GUID-3DFFB07...
- ChumpGPT 3y agoHow is this even legal? They should have just hooked it up and dragged it into the ditch.
- stevehawk 3y agoya this seems like some over politeness by road crews / law enforcement.
- misnome 3y agoRunning 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?
- jackmott 3y agoyeah 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)
- ndsipa_pomu 3y agoThere 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.
- Waterluvian 3y agoFire 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.
- gnfargbl 3y agoIn 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.
- Waterluvian 3y agoGood 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.
- joenathanone 3y ago"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.
- floathub 3y ago9 hours? Nobody had an extension cord?
- floathub 3y agoOr a portable generator?
- ourmandave 3y agoOr, as someone else mentioned, a towing service with a flatbed and a winch.
- chronicsonic 3y agoI assume the roads were blocked by traffic, we have narrow A roads in Britain.
- HPsquared 3y agoThey 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.
- sebazzz 3y agoNitpicking: Modern Tesla Model 3 have 16V batteries (and subsequently also 16V "sigarette igniter" connection instead of 12V)
- ourmandave 3y agoUnanswered: Why did it take 9 hours to move it?
- flutas 3y agoThis 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.
- imtringued 3y agoThere is also the option to just tow the car. https://uploads.tff-forum.de/original/3X/d/7/d7427f37fb68ce35692afa38b3c2f8d4aa5d4348.jpeg https://uploads.tff-forum.de/original/3X/d/7/d7427f37fb68ce3...
- saberience 3y agoWhy 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.
- eastbound 3y agoGood 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?
- rsynnott 3y agoSome of us have been Elon-sceptical for rather longer than that.
- ndsipa_pomu 3y agoWhy 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.
- teknopaul 3y agoThis 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.
- Invictus0 3y agobrakes
- Waterluvian 3y agoIn a way it’s both.
- drewcoo 3y agoExcellent plot device for a crime or spy movie!
- zaroth 3y agoIt’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.
- orwin 3y agoIt'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.
- zaroth 3y agoBMW 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 https://archive.is/dagIR
- orwin 3y agoSorry, 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)
- ChoGGi 3y ago"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?
- nunez 3y agoPeople run out of gas and cause chaos on their local roads all of the time. Nothing to see here.
- Bexy 3y ago[flagged]
- rsynnott 3y ago[flagged]
- Daviey 3y agoLast 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.