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I have a new EV9 and the software on it regularly causes near miss accidents. I’m waiting to see accident statistics after it’s been on the market for a while. They’ll be dismal.

Examples: there are pedestrians nearby and the car is in reverse so it wildly swings the acceleration curve around, cycling between “slam on brakes” to “1-2mph” to “why am I on the other side of the street and standing on the break pedal?”

Even without pedestrians it constantly changes the acceleration curve and this cannot be disabled in a way that reliably survives turning the car off and back on.

Once, a motorcycle was lane splitting, so the adaptive cruise control tried to race it and accelerated at the car in front of me. I had to slam on the brakes.

This is by design: There’s a chapter in the manual explaining the dozen different reasons it’ll fail to regen brake at a stoplight (or, from what I can tell, rear end someone on the freeway) because of low visibility. (Including being on a hill, not going straight, pedestrians, vehicles in other lanes, and motorcycles lane splitting.)

Changing from drive to reverse to drive disables one pedal mode. I’m sure that’s caused at least one collision (when you take your foot off the pedals it automatically accelerates, especially in parking lots).

I’ve had it override steering too. Sometimes it tries to force me out of the lane. Sometimes it wants me to stay in the lane so it overrides emergency maneuvers when other cars try to merge into me.

The beeping is constant, and alert fatigue has set in. There’s even an undocumented alert icon that looks like “car is about to explode”. We don’t know what it means.

Even if they fix the safety issues, we plan to sell it for that reason.

Note that all of this idiocy is possible because they wired together the transmission, throttle, brake and vision systems more deeply than “we need emergency override”.

Anyway, mark my words: The accident rates on this model will be high.



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