Tesla's Trials and Errors
A Tesla owner’s protest over a crash reflects loopholes in data management as experts call out new energy vehicle firms for risking customer safety
It was not the normal display at the Auto Shanghai car show. A disgruntled Tesla owner, wearing a white T-shirt emblazoned with the characters “Brakes don't work,” literally mounted a protest, jumping atop a Tesla Model 3 and refusing to climb down on April 19. Shouting “the brakes malfunction” for several minutes, the woman, identified by police by her surname Zhang, was eventually dragged away by security.
For her troubles, she received five days in police detention for disturbing public order and was released on April 25.
Tesla initially dismissed her as a troublemaker, but Zhang found support among other Tesla drivers in China who claim they have experienced issues such as brake failure and cars suddenly accelerating. Chinese media branded the automaker as arrogant, and the firm's PR woes mounted.
The US automaker, which boasted a record car delivery of 184,800 worldwide and a rise in both revenue and net income in the first quarter of 2021 from global sales, remains stuck in a maelstrom of controversy. About 40 percent of global sales in the first quarter, over 69,000 vehicles, were in the Chinese mainland, shows data from the China Passenger Car Association (CPCA). The media storm and bad publicity may throw a wrench in Tesla's grand plans for China expansion. Its China sales in April dropped by 27 percent from March, though the drop is not regarded by industry insiders as necessarily connected to the negative news.
Zhang was not the only protester at the auto show that day. Her action came two months after her car collided with two other vehicles and a concrete barrier. She claimed the brakes had failed, but Tesla insisted that the driver, Zhang's father, was speeding. Zhang claimed
Tesla was refusing to disclose vital logs, while Tesla claimed it had been trying to communicate with Zhang, but she had refused to allow third-party investigators access. The miscommunication piled up until the day of the auto show when Zhang's frustration boiled over. Although they had initially batted away the complaints, amid Zhang's persistence and growing societal pressure, Tesla released the vehicle's data log, which included speed and braking information. According to Tesla, the brakes were fully functional prior to the crash.
Despite this, Zhang is dogged in her pursuit of the company and continues to question the data, claiming it is inaccurate and that Tesla is withholding information. She alleged the raw data was not from her vehicle and wanted the firm to reveal its source and how they had filtered it. Media reported in early May that Zhang is suing Tesla for mental distress, alleging the company led the public to believe Zhang was lying and acting up. It is still hard to untangle the truth, with both parties claiming to be in the right.
Questioned Data
Tesla claimed Zhang's father did not apply the brake forcibly enough to prevent the crash, and the data it provided shows the car was traveling well over the speed limit at 118.5 kilometers per hour, a far cry from Zhang's claim that it was going 70 km/h, indicating the accident was caused by speeding instead of brake failure.
But Zhang, who was sitting in the back at the time of the crash, questioned the authenticity of the data, saying her father had applied pressure on the brake pedal several times but the car failed to slow in time. The police accident report Zhang provided to media did not say the car was speeding. Zhang also questioned the lack of some key data including the time taken to activate the electronic stability control, a program which improves traction when it detects skidding, as well as the driver's brake force request.
“Even if the car was going 118.5 km/h, theoretically it could brake in five seconds. But the crash happened at a speed of 48 km/h, showing the brake force was not sufficient,” said Wang Xudong, CEO of Zhongchejian Company, a third-party testing agency.
“To clarify who was responsible for the accident, the key is to understand if the driver had adequately made a brake request when they pressed the brake pedal,” said Qiu Bin, an associate research fellow at the School of Vehicle and Mobility, Tsinghua University. He said that if the driver had fully applied the brake but the system failed to respond sufficiently, it would be Tesla's problem, but if the driver had not fully applied the brake, it would be the driver's fault.
But in the data Tesla released, there was no mention of the physical movement signal to the brake pedal, which is necessary to show the driver's brake request. “It requires information about vehicle speed, the positions of the accelerator and brake pedals, and crucially, to judge how the driver was operating the car at that time,” Qiu told Newschina.
Two days after releasing the data, Tesla responded that it was recorded with encryption technologies so it could not be directly collected, revised or deleted. But this failed to dispel the public doubts. Several interviewed industry insiders told Newschina that since the source code is proprietary to the automakers, it is possible to revise or delete the data. But deletions leave trails that could be traced if ordered by a court. The EDR (event data recorder, similar to a plane's black box) is seen as the last way to get to the truth.
“Under the current management system, there is no mechanism to ensure the data of intelligent connected vehicles (ICVS) provided by carmakers is genuine and immutable,” Wang Yao from the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers (CAAM) told The Beijing News in late April when asked about the case. Wang said that CAAM, carmakers, third-party testing agencies and ICT companies have worked out a solution to this dilemma: adopting blockchain-based multi-centered administration of vehicle data by multiple parties, which would ensure the authenticity of the data and help carmakers prove their innocence if necessary. The new system is to be piloted soon.
Absent Supervision
For the time being, Tesla is aggressive about vehicle owners' driving data. Following Zhang's protest, a number of Tesla owners posted on social media that they had requested data from the company after accidents but Tesla refused them all. Zhang's request for data was rejected too at first, until her protest gained media traction and the company started to feel the heat.
He Shanshan, an expert in Icv-related law and policy, said that driving data belongs to individual car owners. “Currently when an accident requires evaluation, both the owner and carmaker can withdraw data from the automobile data recorder or other platforms and take it for authentication,” He said.
But now it is common to see differences between both sides in interpreting ICV data. “Some third-party agencies are not good enough at testing or they misinterpret the analysis. So carmakers refuse to authorize the data for [accident] testing,” He noted.
This is a new challenge specific to the new energy vehicle sector, because combustion vehicles do not involve such complex data. Responding to the case, Wang Yao told the Security Times in late April that the issues around ICV data are very complicated. It includes the external environment, vehicle data, driving behavior of users and privacy. There is no clear law or regulation yet as to who owns the data and no set procedure for carmakers to follow when they need to release data after an incident.
In 2017, the Chinese government asked new energy vehicle makers to upload real-time running data to a State platform for dynamic supervision and better data sharing. But the volume and types of data captured by the platform are not enough to analyze autonomous vehicle accidents, Wang Yao said.
CAAM suggested the government and carmakers cooperate in building a complete supervision system for ICVS. But Qiu said it is not appropriate to allow the government to collect car producers'
data, nor will the latter be willing to do so, as it involves technical secrets.
Some insiders believe it is reasonable to classify the data. Wang Xudong said data involving public security such as brakes and system controls should be supervised by the government. CAAM suggested that relevant departments have reliable access to data involving national security and public security.
Meanwhile, there are not enough third-party testing agencies, which Wang Xudong said are important for collecting data and evaluating incidents due to their objectivity and neutrality.
In August 2020, a Tesla owned by Chen Ming from Wenzhou, Zhejiang Province bumped into dozens of cars in a parking lot after it allegedly sped up and suffered brake failure. Tesla responded that its backend data showed nothing was wrong with the vehicle, claiming the accident was caused by the driver, who mistook the accelerator for the brake. Chen himself could not find a testing agency that was able to properly evaluate the data from the vehicle's software.
It is a headache for many Tesla owners in China. An employee of a third-party testing agency told The Beijing News that Tesla gets data directly from its internal sensors and monitoring equipment before sending it back to headquarters so it is difficult for anyone outside to “get even a general idea” of the data.
The majority of new energy vehicle producers set firewalls to prevent third-party testing agencies from reading the data, said Wang Xudong. “Now only a few agencies [in China] can test new energy vehicle data,” he said. This has caused a much-criticized situation in which carmakers always have the final say in judging an accident, making them both player and referee.
“Testing agencies need to develop their capabilities. We also need more regulation and clarity on what data is used in evaluating responsibility in vehicle accidents to dispel the concerns of carmakers,” He Shanshan said.
Regulation Urgency
Wherever Zhang's protest leads, it is seen by many as a reminder of the urgency to strengthen regulation of the fast-growing new energy vehicle (NEV) sector. China's NEV ownership reached 4.92 million by the end of 2020, an increase of 29.18 percent from 2019, among which electric vehicles made up 81.32 percent.
Since 2020, there have been reports of incidents involving “out-ofcontrol” Teslas from across China. In a March report, the Shanghaibased news portal IT Times wrote that it interviewed 20 Tesla owners involved in accidents in different regions and found most had one thing in common: The vehicles sped up all of a sudden and the brakes failed. In the accidents, either the vehicles were damaged, or worse, the owners were injured and the vehicles ignited, leading to huge losses.
In the US, Tesla's current biggest market, there have also been complaints about the brake systems. In 2018, Consumer Reports, a US magazine, tested Tesla's Model 3 and found it had a longer braking distance than any modern car they had tested. After the report, Tesla CEO Elon Musk acknowledged the car had a brake problem, promising to roll out a solution in a few days. In the US, Tesla has been involved in hundreds of accidents involving sudden acceleration and brake failure.
A year ago, Brian Sparks, an independent investor who was impressed with the unusual high rate of complaints against Tesla for sudden unintended acceleration, filed a petition to the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, requesting an investigation over 232 incidents involving Teslas. But the result, which came out in January, showed the sudden acceleration and subsequent crashes were all attributed to drivers who mistook the accelerators for brakes. Despite this, some safety advocates warned that Tesla has “put technology into the hands of consumers who don't properly understand it and incorrectly believe their cars are capable of safely driving themselves,” The Washington Post wrote in a January report.
In response to similar accidents in China, Tesla always cited reasons like “wet ground” or the drivers “mistaking the accelerator for the brakes,” claiming its braking system worked normally.
According to Wang Xudong, with safety lapse allegations mounting, if any problems are found with the car or if the ibooster (a system that builds up brake pressure autonomously in an emergency) does not work on Tesla vehicles, the producer should suspend sales and shoulder some responsibility.
Besides Tesla, some Chinese NEV brands have racked up complaints for problems including brake failures. Wang noted that NEVS are fast to adopt new technologies, but how these technologies work in coordination is a question that requires carmakers to collect sufficient data for testing and verification.
“A car requires a long period of testing, from design to production. Even newly designed combustion vehicles need to go through constant road tests in different climate and ground conditions, like in the Tibet Autonomous Region, Northeast China, the seaside or wetlands, so they can collect tons of data to test the performance of the car, before putting it on the market. But at present there is far from enough data collection on NEVS,” Wang Xudong said.
The majority of the data collection on new vehicles should be finished in the testing phase before they launch, but in the fast pace of NEV development, some makers let consumers do the testing first, then their technicians obtain the data from background databases, Wang Xudong said.
“In this process, if something goes wrong with the program, customers lives and safety are at risk,” he added.
“For ICVS, their technology, product design and business model remain in an exploratory phase. A big challenge the industry faces is the testing and verification of their products,” Wang Yao said.
According to Wang Xudong, the protest involving Tesla has exposed wider issues and loopholes in the management of new energy vehicles at large, including data management and pre-launch testing. “It's time to carry out comprehensive standardized regulation of the industry,” he said.★