Jonathan Gitlin
Tesla’s troubled Cybertruck appears to have hit yet another speed bump. Over the weekend, dozens of waiting customers reported that their impending deliveries had been canceled due to “an unexpected delay regarding the preparation of your vehicle.”
Tesla has not announced an official stop sale or recall, and as of now, the reason for the suspended deliveries is unknown. But it’s possible the electric pickup truck has a problem with its accelerator.
Tesla has been accused of making cars that have sudden unintended acceleration problems. In 2017, the company was the subject of a class-action lawsuit based on at least 23 accounts of Tesla Models S and X suffering from this problem. Tesla vehemently denied any such problem, and in 2020, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration declined to investigate.
But in 2023, a safety researcher in Minnesota published a white paper with a potential mechanism, showing how a voltage spike in Tesla’s inverter could cause a car to experience an acceleration event. That same year, a leaked trove of Tesla documents to the German publication Handelsblatt included more than 2,400 customer complaints alleging sudden unintended brake problems. By July 2023, NHTSA decided it was time to investigate the problem.
This time, the potential culprit might be a lot easier to identify than a defective inverter experiencing a random voltage spike.
Yesterday, a Cybertruck owner on TikTok posted a video showing how the metal cover of his accelerator pedal allegedly worked itself partially loose and became jammed underneath part of the dash. The driver was able to stop the car with the brakes and put it in park. At the beginning of the month, another Cybertruck owner claimed to have crashed into a light pole due to an unintended acceleration problem.
Lending this theory credence, Whole Mars Blog, a social media account with close links to the automaker, stated on Saturday that “Tesla has stopped all Cybertruck deliveries for 7 days due to an issue with the accelerator pedal.”