A Tesla Model 3 taxi cab got involved in a severe accident in Paris. The first official information about it is that the cause was an SUA (sudden unintended acceleration) episode and braking issues. About 20 people got hurt, five of them with life-threatening injuries.
The crash happened on December 11 at around 9 PM in the 13e arrondissement in Paris. Le Figaro reports that the police informed the driver was traveling on rue d’Ivry (it’s actually avenue) when his car suddenly started accelerating and could not brake. Jérôme Coumet, the mayor of the 13e arrondissement, said on Twitter the crash was caused by a “technical failure.” He also said that “the accelerator (pedal) would have stuck.”
With no control, the EV first hit a bike rider on avenue d’Ivry. The taxi cab would then have hit two pedestrians at the crossing with rue de Tolbiac, smashed a glass recycling container – sending glass bits into other passersby – another pedestrian and a traffic light at avenue de Choisy. It just stopped when it hit a van close to the restaurant Le Mandarin de Choisy, according to CNEWS.
French newspapers and websites have conflicting information about the number of injured people. CNEWS talks about eight people in ICUs, five with life-threatening injuries, and 12 more lightly hurt people. Le Figaro mentioned nine people hurt. Le Parisien said 7 people had life-threatening injuries, and 13 went to the emergency room. Unfortunately, Le Parisien seems to have talked to the people involved in the accident, but we have no access to the article.
This is not the first report of SUA incidents with Tesla vehicles. Still, it seems to be one of the worst ones in which those claims happened. Jason Hughes, known as the Tesla Hacker, has already dismissed SUA incidents in Tesla vehicles as impossible due to how the brakes override the accelerator pedal whenever they are activated.
The latest hypothesis for these episodes is that cruise control is accidentally turned on. When the previously set speed is much higher than the one the vehicle is traveling at, it accelerates too fast to the established speed and looks like an SUA episode. In China, the government obliged Tesla to take measures and it added a sound to warn TACC (Traffic-Aware Cruise Control) was switched on. Tesla has never clarified if this is the cause for SUA events, and investigations have never concluded that this was really the case. Perhaps the French police will help determine what causes such problems in Tesla vehicles.