Following a petition to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) to recall Tesla vehicles for “unintended acceleration,” Tesla has responded saying there is no evidence to support the claim.
Brian Sparks originally filed the request on September 30, 2019 and said “it appears Tesla vehicles have a Sudden Unintended Acceleration Problem and Tesla must know about this problem.”
In their response today, Tesla calls the petition “completely false” and says Sparks is a Tesla stock short-seller. CNBC confirms that Sparks “is currently shorting Tesla stock,” calling into question his motivations.
In the meantime, after going into the technical details as to why unintended acceleration should not be possible, Tesla highlighted their ongoing cooperation with the NHTSA:
“We are transparent with NHTSA, and routinely review customer complaints of unintended acceleration with them,” says the blog post. “Over the past several years, we discussed with NHTSA the majority of the complaints alleged in the petition. In every case we reviewed with them, the data proved the vehicle functioned properly.”