Tesla Recalls 53,000 Model S, Model X Cars For Stuck Parking Brakes (cnet.com) 107
Tesla has issued a voluntary recall for approximately 53,000 Model S and Model X cars, which may be susceptible to having stuck parking brakes. The company hasn't received any reports of the parking brake system failing, but decided to issue a recall for precautionary reasons. According to CNET, the recall affects 31,000 Model S and Model X cars in the U.S., "and all affected vehicles carry build dates between February and October 2016." From the report: The problem lies with the electric parking brakes that help secure the vehicles when placed in Park. The parking brakes contain a small gear that might fracture, which would prevent the parking brake from releasing. Thus, a car that enters Park may not be able to move again. This has no bearing on the vehicles' regular brakes, and Tesla has received no reports of the parking brake system failing to hold a car in place. Tesla estimates that about 2 percent of the vehicles recalled contain the improperly manufactured gear. It should be noted that the parking brake assembly is from a third-party supplier, as well.
Not a big deal technically (Score:2)
Re: Not a big deal technically (Score:2, Insightful)
You're serious? They only built 50,000 cars in 2015. Tesla lacks the traditional service structure as well.
This will be an interesting year for Tesla.
Merits of lawsuit ? (Score:2)
And they will soon be sued out of business [jalopnik.com].
a.k.a. "OMG, a few assistive tools that simplify driving(*) aren't actually a electronic horse (or donkey) that can bring me home safely even if I sleep the whole way through ?"
How this lawsuit has any merit ? Had this been filed in Europe, the lawyers and plaintiff would had been laughed away of the court room.
OTOH, similar kind of technology has been available on car of European manufacturer for quite some time (random examples: Volvo, Mercedes), and is an absolute standard with some constructors (example
Release the brake... (Score:1)
model Stuck (Score:2)
Well there's your problem (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem lies with the electric parking brakes. . .
Funny, in all the decades I've driven, I've never had a single incident with a mechanical parking brake. Neither the one in the middle between the seats, or the one on the floor.
Considering his smarts, it sure seems dumb for Musk to reinvent the wheel, especially for something the end user has no control over whether it works or not. As I have said many times before, there's a reason mechanical light switches are still around. They work every time.
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sdrawkcab
FTFY
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Rust is also a common problem with traditional cable-based parking brakes. Get a little water in the cable, and over time, it rusts and freezes up.
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Rust is also a made up problem with traditional cable-based parking brakes.
Fixed that for you. I have never had a parking cable rust even on a 10 year old car in the north east.
Bully for you, mate. But it happened on my old Ford which was less than 10 yrs old at the time, also in the north east.
Re: Well there's your problem (Score:2)
I had it happen on a 15yo S10. And again on a 5yo Nissan.
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With an electric car the risk is not only low it is nearly non-existent.
To activate the brakes the car has to have had enough charge to propel itself. There is perhaps a very small chance that the car could lose power in the exact moment where it was unable to engage the brake before power to the system was lost. Once the battery is discharged though that car is not moving under its own power, electric parking brakes or not. If it has enough power to move then it has enough power to engage/disengage the
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In what situation would you find a need to push this car? We're talking about a very rare situation, even rarer than a mechanical parking brake getting frozen while engaged.
I kind of see your point but why would anyone need to push an electric car? What would the destination be? Maybe someone might need to disengage the brakes for a tow but any tow truck I've seen would have the ability to provide 12 volt power with sufficient current and duration to do so. It's also not all that uncommon for a "tow tru
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I think that's how Subaru implements the hill holder for stick shifts.
Some people also don't have good upper-body strength. I drive a friend's car frequently and when I park it I just zip it up, but he can't release the brake while seated normally. He has to lean way over and two-hand it to get it free. When he parks it I can take it out of gear and budge the car forward if I lean on it enough. Perhaps a better designed lever would help, but an electric brake would eliminate the problem for him.
I still
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I think that's how Subaru implements the hill holder for stick shifts.
It used to be built into the vac servo... back in the early nineties.
Some people also don't have good upper-body strength.
It's a pedal on my 300SD and on my F250. The pedal mechanism is broken on the F250 :)
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Lolol my last F150's parking brake was useless, since I had to park it on a hill. The damn thing was close to 7000 lbs unloaded
This must be one of them newfangled ones. My 1992 F250 7.3 with a turbo is only about 6k wet.
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Protip: Stop using the partking brake entirely. At least unless you're parking on a significant slope. First gear is more than enough to keep the car in place, and there's the extra advantage of not risking the braking pads freezing stuck to the discs.
In 10 years of driving ~200,000 km, I've touched the parking brake maybe 10 times.
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Protip: Stop using the partking brake entirely.
No "pro" would ever tell someone to do this.
First gear is more than enough to keep the car in place,
Again, no "pro" would ever tell someone to do this. You know why parking brakes exist? Because letting your gearbox take the strain of holding your car in place is one of the stupidest things you can do. Parking brakes exist for a reason. The people who design cars wouldn't put one in if it didn't have a use.
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gearbox take the strain of holding your car in place is one of the stupidest things you can do
Talk about stupid. Guess what, the gearbox is designed to withstand that strain with ease. Why is that? Because it's a completely negligible fraction of the strain it has to withstand under normal operating conditions.
What you're worried about is not a problem at all.
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1. is about automatic transmission
2. is about automatic transmission
3. it's not "the weight of the car", and there's no problem with the transmission being subject to a little strain, because it's designed to withstand hundreds of times that, as i've already said in the comment you're replying to
4. is about automatic transmission
Next time, try replying with something that actually pertains to the matter being discussed. Until then, practice your reading comprehension.
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Please read the entire discussion before adding your noise, this was specifically about stick shifting.
That said, I live in Germany where cars equipped with manual transmission account for about 80% ot total car sales [www.welt.de] so your reply, while theoretically valid, is practically irrelevant.
brake actuation (Score:2)
My Subaru has an electric parking brake (my wife wanted it). I can't figure out what's wrong with a mechanical parking brake.
For a plain simple old car, an electric parking brake only makes sense for one single element :
- pulling it up is easier because it's not you exerting the actual force on the brake, but the brake's electrical motor.
If your wife doesn't have that much hand force to the point that pulling the lever is cumbersome, an electrical brake makes it much simpler to use.
(Push the button instead of try to pull the lever)
For a modern car filled with electronics, it's an entirely different wolrd of possibility : now the
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Have you ever had an issue with electric parking breaks in all your decades of driving?
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gods yes. They stick and freeze all the time. broken cables are not uncommon either.
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No, but Anton Yelchin might have.
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And by making it electric, the driver does not have to worry about it. When the car is put in park, it engages.
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There are two kinds of people...
Stick shift people. They use their parking/turning/emergency brakes. The mechanism does need occasional attention.
Automatic people. They never use their parking brakes. This means that in the old days of drum brakes their brake self adjuster never actuated (most brands and years, exceptions exist that self adjusted in reverse or needed manual adjustment). They ended up
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My truck has an automatic transmission and yet I use the parking brake quite regularly. Do I still fit in your two "buckets" of people?
Someone might ask why I bother with the parking brake if I have an automatic transmission. Where I live there are quite a few hills and if I park on a hill and fail to engage the parking brake this puts pressure on the transmission such that it can take an "uncomfortable" amount of force to shift out of park. What do I mean by "uncomfortable"? I mean in that it's enough
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I was taught the same thing. Yes, you put the car in Park. But you also engage the parking brake because the transmission does lock in Park, but it's only a little piece of metal. The parking brake is cheap, a transmission is expensive.
Also, on modern cars, there is no "e-brake" anymore. The parking
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Drum brakes for the most part are dead except in trucks. I'll point out the obvious mistake though. The self-adjuster triggers on every pedal depress, not when you use use the e-brake. The design of it is to keep the rear shoes at "near contact" with the drum. When I was an apprentice ~20 years ago, the guy I was under had been in the industry 50 years and had never seen a situation you're talking about. The shop I worked in? You could see 30k vehicles a year or sometimes even 80k vehicles, it wasn't a
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Just not true. GM's, Ford and most MOPARs self adjust with each e-brake use. Some old mopars self adjust with each reverse. No drum brake self adjusts with each brake application. You are thinking of disk brakes.
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Stick shift people. They use their parking/turning/emergency brakes. The mechanism does need occasional attention.
Stick shifter here, have never used the parking brake (except when parking on a massive slope).
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If nothing else, you should learn to use it in a turn. Good fun.
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True -- but I like my tires so I'm doing that only on snowy roads (at low speeds of course).
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Read a little further. The problem is with a poorly manufactured gear, so it's a mechanical problem, not an electrical one. And mechanical brakes, and light switches for that matter, can and do break or fail for various reasons.
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One of the features is parking itself.
How do you do that with a traditional parking brake?
I've had problems with mechanical parking brakes. The cables stretch, so need readjusting. Drum brakes get sticky, so they don't come off smoothly.
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Every car I have owned has had to have the mechanical parking brake adjusted at one point. I even had the cable break on one which left me with no parking brake.
Mechanical light switches? I have an older house and I am constantly replacing old mechanical light switches. They break all the time.
Toyota was working on an electric car with Tesla a few years ago but broke off cooperation. One of the issues (don't know if this was a "deal breaker") was that the old school Toyota engineers just couldn't fathom how
Re: Well there's your problem (Score:1)
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Considering his smarts, it sure seems dumb for Musk to reinvent the wheel, especially for something the end user has no control over whether it works or not. As I have said many times before, there's a reason mechanical light switches are still around. They work every time.
Have you seen the doors on the Model X? Elon Musk is the new Rube Goldberg. ;)
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Really?
Don't get me wrong, I am all for fully-mechanical parking brakes and am also wary of the electronic ones. Especially the "smart" ones that that automatically disengage when the computer thinks that's what you want, those are straight up dangerous.
But I've seen the mechanical ones fail in all sorts of ways. It's something you have to keep track of and occasionally maintain.
Right now I have one of the foot-operated ones and the bracket is bent enough that sometimes the catch doesn't engage on the first
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I had a mechanical parking brake break on me when my father was trying to teach me how to drive a car. So the next lesson was how to replace the mechanical parking brake.
Also, "a small gear that might fracture, which would prevent the parking brake from releasing" so it's a mechanical failure anyway.
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I share your distaste for EPBs, but I have been party to parking brakes which have gone wrong. The mechanism froze up on one side of my A8. The ball popped off the end of the cable on my dad's F150. The pedal mechanism has gone wrong on my F250. The brake works but the pedal ass'y is shot.
Also, it works now, but apparently the mixer for the parking brake on the T1N sprinter is a common point of failure.
Manual parking brakes definitely go wrong.
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My dad's Ford has an electronic parking brake, and I still have no idea how to release it. When I borrow his car, I just never use the parking brake. The car also has automatic headlights, and I can't figure out how to turn them on permanently while driving through a tunnel (there's about a ten second delay when the lights are on full auto). Don't even get me started on the radio, with its confusing, built-in media center.
One of the biggest reasons why I own a Subaru WRX is because it's one of the exceed
Re:Well there's your problem (Score:4, Interesting)
1) It's a mechanical device under huge manual and braking stress. They break. They can't not break. Maybe you haven't seen it, maybe you just don't use the break or own enough cars or care enough to check.
2) I used to buy old cars. 5-10 years old. Until recently, I never bought new. I used to change car when they didn't pass the relevant tests, so I bought a lot of second-hand cars. Almost ALL of them had parking brake problems. From "it doesn't do anything" to "it needs a serious amount of adjusting" to it literally could not be released once activated.
3) My dad does all my repairs/maintenance as he worked in the trade for decades. Ask him if mechanical parking brakes never fail.
4) My new car, a year or so old now, has electric parking brakes. I distrusted them, like you. When my car was new, I took it to a couple of off-road locations to test lots of things (I'm not a boyracer, speed was NOT one of them, I'm literally talking about "Oh, I don't like that... how does that work if..." scenarios) - best way to get to know and trust a car is to actually activate these things in a safe place.
Electronic parking brake? Massively outperforms a mechanical one. I could not make it not activate on demand. I could not make it activate inadvertently (it appears the button/toggle that controls it has debouncing that's undergone a lot of testing to avoid inadvertent activation, but yet work whenever you need it to). And there's a reason I couldn't make it work inadvertently... the parking brake is not just a parking brake but your only non-hydraulic method of stopping the car in an emergency.
I deliberately read the latest car design requirements from the government and, at least in my country, the parking brake must still operate independently so it can be used in the car of a brake failure. I was worried they were obsoleting a safety backup, but in fact the requirements are much more stringent now than most of the old cars I used to drive.
And so I took it on a non-public road. And I poodled along and pressed the parking brake. Holy shit did it stop. Even on gravel. Okay, so I got braver and braver and asked it to stop me from faster and faster speeds (never going stupid, but still - on a motorway this might need me to stop the car before it hits a line of traffic, late, after I realise the normal brakes don't work).
HOLY SHIT. You have no idea how effective it is compared to a traditional cabled parking brake (no handbrake turns, for sure, because you just don't get time, but then I would never attempt that anyway). I only avoided whacking my head on the steering wheel each time because I knew it was coming after building up from the slower speeds (presumably airbags would kick in in a collision, I'm not testing that though!).
I tested the "auto-release when you drive". I couldn't make it release when I didn't want it to. Literally, you have to have enough driver-instructed forward motion that you would hear the brakes screech anyway if you did move and it deactivates a fraction of a second AFTER you're actually moving against the brake.
Hill starts? I actually worry now that with electric parking brakes, you never have to be able to do one properly. They make it that reliable and easy. I've literally never rolled back, not even an inch, unless you are absolutely 100% negligent and wait for the brake to release and then suddenly let get of everything and it still takes a second or two to roll back because the car has to have been moving forward to release the brake.
And if I hold the foot-brake for a few seconds while stationary, it knows that and just puts on the parking brake too. It doesn't do it while moving at even a tiny speed where you can barely see the wheels moving even if you're doing that by holding the normal brake. It knows the difference.
Someone put a lot of testing, thought and effort into my car's electric parking brake. I couldn't make it do things I didn't want, even when I was completely abusing the mechanism
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I had an older Car where the Parking Brake became stuck. A little thing called Rust can be a real B*tch.
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More poor quality control from Tesla (Score:1)
Now if they would fix the damn roof seals from leaking every time it rains....
The lever you have pulled, "Brakes," is no longer (Score:2)
The lever you have pulled, "Brakes," is no longer in service. Please make a note of it.
Third party? (Score:2)
"Tesla estimates that about 2 percent of the vehicles recalled contain the improperly manufactured gear. It should be noted that the parking brake assembly is from a third-party supplier, as well."
If this is from a third party then it seems probable that this assembly was offered to other car makers. Have other car makes used this assembly? This is a voluntary recall from Tesla so it is possible that this is left unresolved by anyone with a car made by someone other than Tesla and has electrically activat
Only news because it's Tesla (Score:3)
Would this be of note if Toyota, Ford or VW issued a recal for this?
Parts from subcontractors are often not up to snuff - the problem is noted, a recall is issued and that's it.
This is only news because it's on a Tesla - I'm not a Musk fanboi but let's get a little perspective on the matter.
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It's an issue because tesla makes shit cars [teslamotorsclub.com]. If Ford, Toyota or VW delivered a car to a customer with a cracked A pillar it would be national news but it gets ignored tesla fucks up.
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Thank you for the reference.
Wait, the brake never actuallty failed? (Score:3)
Tesla has issued a voluntary recall for approximately 53,000 Model S and Model X cars, which may be susceptible to having stuck parking brakes. The company hasn't received any reports of the parking brake system failing, but decided to issue a recall for precautionary reasons.
Well, this is the first time I heard about this. Look like they never watched "Fight Club" and the X=A*B*C and if XCost of Requall, then you shouldn't do one.
They've been a problem (Score:2)
I don't need no brake (Score:1)
I never use my brake. That's just how I roll.