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Tesla will assist Chinese authorities in investigating a dramatic Tesla Model Y crash in Guangdong, China, which killed two and injured three. But rumors have been flying on social media with potential causes of the crash, most of which are untrue or impossible.

The accident happened on November 5, and video has been circulating on Chinese social media. The CCTV video shows (warning: graphic) a Tesla Model Y attempting to park, then speeding off on a two-lane road, swerving between lanes at high speed, sideswiping cars and motorcycles before eventually crashing into a storefront about 30 seconds and 2.6 kilometers later.

An unnamed family member of the 55-year-old male driver stated that the driver had issues with the brake pedal when he was about to pull over in front of the family store, as reported by Jimu News. As best we can tell, the driver survived with injuries.

Tesla, as is often the case, has claimed that vehicle logs show that the brake pedal was not applied during the incident, and that the accelerator pedal was pressed for a significant portion of the event, and cautioned against people believing “rumors” about the incident. CCTV video shows that the brake lights were not illuminated in rear shots of the car, though they appear to turn on shortly at about 23 seconds after the start of the incident.

Police in Guangdong will work with a third-party agency to assess vehicle logs and CCTV footage to determine the truth about the incident.

(Warning: people die in this video, though it is not immediately clear from the footage. squeamish people may nevertheless not want to watch)

Tesla has faced other accusations of malfunctioning brake pedals in the past, including from a Chinese customer who staged a protest at their Shanghai Motor Show booth claiming that an accident she was in was a result of a brake failure. These accusations are not just limited to China, Tesla has also received many complaints in the US, which it responded to in a blog post claiming “there is no ‘unintended acceleration’ in Tesla vehicles.”

These complaints were examined by the NHTSA which found that incidents of sudden unintended acceleration in Teslas were a result of driver error, and not due to any design flaw in the vehicle. The NHTSA reminds drivers that there are 16,000 preventable crashes per year in the US due to pedal error and cautions drivers to be aware of this problem.

This didn’t stop social media from swirling with rumors about the latest Tesla crash, though. Both on Chinese and English-language social media, there have been many posts suggesting various causes without evidence, most of which do not stand up to basic scrutiny.

Some have claimed that the vehicle was attempting to autopark and then went haywire, running off at high speed. But the type of swerving, hard-accelerating behavior shown in the video is not characteristic of Autopilot, much less autopark, and both would have been disabled by a tap on the brake pedal at any point.

Others stated that the vehicle’s motor is too strong for the brakes to overcome, but given that the brake lights were not on and vehicle brakes are designed to overcome the force of the motor/engine, this explanation is not satisfactory either.

The accusations are similar to those that have happened with other vehicles. Famously, Toyota faced a “sudden unintended acceleration” recall in 2009-2011, where the automaker recalled various parts of their vehicles in response to an uptick in reports of unintended acceleration. While design flaws in floor mats or accelerator pedals may have contributed to some cases, most cases were found to be issues of driver error – and were more common among elderly and unskilled drivers. Increased reports tracked media coverage of the problem, with more reports coming in as media coverage intensified.

China is Tesla’s second-largest market. The company recently started pulling demand levers, including cutting prices, as a response to falling sales in the country.

Electrek’s Take

While it is entirely possible that there is some unexamined cause here, it’s almost certainly the same cause as it always is in these situations: someone pressed the wrong pedal, and then kept pressing it when they panicked.

This doesn’t mean there can’t be a design flaw involved. I’ve noticed first-time Tesla drivers getting the pedals crossed (i.e., accidentally pressing both pedals at the same time) perhaps more often than I would expect in a vehicle. It’s possible that the position of the pedals is a little closer than they should be, though I am not an engineer with particular expertise in pedal safety regulations, so take that with a grain of salt. Also, whenever this happens, the car has popped up a warning about crossed pedals and automatically cut power to the accelerator, favoring the brake over the accelerator – so that couldn’t be the cause of this crash.

But crediting this to Autopilot just doesn’t make any sense. This is clearly not Autopilot behavior, as anyone familiar with the system (and aware of its downsides) can tell. I’d bet that the third-party investigation will find that the driver was just pressing the accelerator the whole time, and that this was human error, as is the case in many crashes. So why so much discussion of this Tesla crash specifically?

Tesla is a popular topic on social media – it’s a high-profile brand, it’s different, and it drives a lot of traffic for various reasons, one of which due to its firebrand CEO who loves to be the center of attention. Whenever anything happens with Tesla, people talk about it – there are deadly crashes in various cars every day, most of which do not generate nearly as much social media discussion or articles (such as this one, sigh) about them. People just always have something to say about Tesla.

The presence of social media rumors can especially be expected right now, given that it is quite popular to “dunk on” Tesla CEO Elon Musk lately, due to his recent behavior and the dumpster fire associated with his purchase of the very social media platform where many of these rumors are circulating: twitter.

Twitter has long been a source of rapidly-spread disinformation, which Musk himself has participated in. He has routinely spread COVID-19 disinformation, among other topics, while promising that his purchase of the company would result in the removal of guardrails intended to protect against disinformation on the social media site. For example, he recently tweeted (and later deleted) that “there is a tiny possibility there might be more to this story than meets the eye,” echoing a false and bigoted conspiracy theory about a violent attack on Paul Pelosi, husband of US Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.

This sort of active disinformation spreading from the CEO of Twitter and Tesla naturally leads to public resentment that the world’s richest man would spend so much of his time and effort on polluting information streams instead of fixing his companies. So some number of people will be uninterested in seeing “his side” of the story, and will actively distrust anything that he or Tesla has to say, since he is spending so much public effort spreading disinformation lately.

If Tesla’s mission is to “accelerate the advent of sustainable transport” – and they are the company most responsible for electrification currently – then it doesn’t seem particularly productive for the CEO to spend so much time spreading social media disinformation, turning public opinion against him and his company and its mission. We’d like to see less of that.

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Economists, experts call for governments to ditch hydrogen, go fully electric

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Economists, experts call for governments to ditch hydrogen, go fully electric

In a joint statement, French and German economists have called on governments to adopt “a common approach” to decarbonize European trucking fleets – and they’re calling for a focus on fully electric trucks, not hydrogen.

France and Germany are the two largest economies in the EU, and they share similar challenges when it comes to freight decarbonization. The two countries also share a border, and the traffic between the two nations generates major cross-border flows that create common externalities between the two countries.

At the same time, the EU’s transport sector has struggled to reduce emissions at the same rate as other industries – and road freight in particular is a major contributor to harmful carbon emissions issue due to that industry’s heavy reliance on diesel-powered trucks.

And for once, it seems like rail isn’t a viable option:

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While rail remains competitive mainly for heavy, homogeneous goods over long distances. Most freight in Europe is indeed transported over distances of less than 200 km and involves consignment weights of up to 30 tonnes (GCEE, 2024) In most such cases, transportation by rail instead of truck is not possible or not competitive. Moreover, taking into account the goods currently transported in intermodal transport units over distances of more than 300 km, the modal shift potential from road to rail would be only 6% in Germany and less than 2% in France.

FRANCO-GERMAN COUNCIL OF ECONOMIC EXPERTS (FGCEE)

That leaves trucks – and, while numerous government incentives currently exist to promote the parallel development of both hydrogen and battery electric vehicle infrastructures, the study is clear in picking a winner.

“Policies should focus on battery-electric trucks (BET) as these represent the most mature and market-ready technology for road freight transport,” reads the the FGCEE statement. “Hence, to ramp-up usage of BET public funding should be used to accelerate the roll-out of fast-charging networks along major corridors and in private depots.”

The appeal was signed by the co-chair of the advisory body on the German side is the chairwoman of the German Council of Economic Experts, Monika Schnitzer. Camille Landais co-chairs the French side. On the German side, the appeal was signed by four of the five experts; Nuremberg-based energy economist Veronika Grimm (who also sits on the National Hydrogen Council, which is committed to promoting H2 trucks and filling stations) did not sign.

You can read an English version of the CAE FGCEE joint statement here.

Electrek’s Take

Hydrogen-sceptical truck maker MAN to produce limited series of 200 vehicles with H2 combustion engines
MAN hydrogen semi; via MAN Trucks.

MAN Trucks’ CEO famously said that it was “impossible” for hydrogen to compete with BEVs, and even committed to building 200 hydrogen-powered semi truck to prove out that hypothesis.

He’s not alone. MAN’s board member for research and development, Frederik Zohm, said that the company is the one saying hydrogen still has years to go. “(MAN) continues to research fuel cell technology based on battery electrics,” he said, in a statement quoted by Hydrogen Insight, before another board member added that, “we (MAN) expect that, in the future, we will be able to best serve the vast majority of our customers’ transport applications with battery-electric trucks.”

With companies like Volvo and Renault and now Mercedes racking up millions of miles on their respective battery electric semi truck fleets, it’s no longer even close. EV is the way.

SOURCE | IMAGES: CAE FGCEE; via Electrive.

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Quick Charge | the terrifying Trump tariffs are finally upon us!

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Quick Charge | the terrifying Trump tariffs are finally upon us!

On today’s tariff-tastic episode of Quick Charge, we’ve got tariffs! Big ones, small ones, crazy ones, and fake ones – but whether or not you agree with the Trump tariffs coming into effect tomorrow, one thing is absolutely certain: they are going to change the price you pay for your next car … and that price won’t be going down!

Everyone’s got questions about what these tariffs are going to mean for their next car buying experience, but this is a bigger question, since nearly every industry in the US uses cars and trucks to move their people and products – and when their costs go up, so do yours.

Prefer listening to your podcasts? Audio-only versions of Quick Charge are now available on Apple PodcastsSpotifyTuneIn, and our RSS feed for Overcast and other podcast players.

New episodes of Quick Charge are recorded, usually, Monday through Thursday (and sometimes Sunday). We’ll be posting bonus audio content from time to time as well, so be sure to follow and subscribe so you don’t miss a minute of Electrek’s high-voltage daily news.

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Got news? Let us know!
Drop us a line at tips@electrek.co. You can also rate us on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, or recommend us in Overcast to help more people discover the show.

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SunZia Wind’s massive 2.4 GW project hits a big milestone

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SunZia Wind’s massive 2.4 GW project hits a big milestone

GE Vernova has produced over half the turbines needed for SunZia Wind, which will be the largest wind farm in the Western Hemisphere when it comes online in 2026.

GE Vernova has manufactured enough turbines at its Pensacola, Florida, factory to supply over 1.2 gigawatts (GW) of the turbines needed for the $5 billion, 2.4 GW SunZia Wind, a project milestone. The wind farm will be sited in Lincoln, Torrance, and San Miguel counties in New Mexico.

At a ribbon-cutting event for Pensacola’s new customer experience center, GE Vernova CEO Scott Strazik noted that since 2023, the company has invested around $70 million in the Pensacola factory.

The Pensacola investments are part of the announcement GE Vernova made in January that it will invest nearly $600 million in its US factories and facilities over the next two years to help meet the surging electricity demands globally. GE Vernova says it’s expecting its investments to create more than 1,500 new US jobs.

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Vic Abate, CEO of GE Vernova Wind, said, “Our dedicated employees in Pensacola are working to address increasing energy demands for the US. The workhorse turbines manufactured at this world-class factory are engineered for reliability and scalability, ensuring our customers can meet growing energy demand.”

SunZia Wind and Transmission will create US history’s largest clean energy infrastructure project.

Read more: The largest clean energy project in US history closes $11B, starts full construction


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