A man from North Bay, Ontario, says that his teenage daughter failed her road test for her driver G because she was driving her Tesla Mod and only used the regenerative braking of the car to decrease.
Electric and hybrid vehicles have the option of using the regenerative braking, where the electric motor of the vehicle is invested and the vehicle stops.
“Essentially, you can stop without even touching the brake pedal,” said Eric Simard.
But Simard said her daughter failed because she never used the car brakes.
He said his daughter was taking her car for the test, so she did not know how to turn off the function and told her that she could not stop the test to call it.
Simard shared the results of the road tests of his daughter of the Ontario Management Test with CBC News. In them, the examiner marked a box that indicates that the vehicle was “out of service.”
“I find it quite frustrating because although it is a regenerative braking and you are not using the brake pedal, you are clearly the one that has the total control of making the vehicle stop or decrease the speed,” he said.
The regenerative braking only enters when the driver rises from the accelerator pedal, which Simard argued shows the intention to reduce speed at a specific time.
Simard added that his daughter was also docked by a characteristic in her tesla that Chimes when a traffic light becomes green.
In an email to CBC News, Julia Caslin, spokesman for the Ministry of Transportation of Ontario, said that the province’s graduate license system “requires that drivers always demonstrate a safe operation of the vehicle and total control, regardless of the characteristics of the vehicle.”
“Applicants are expected to understand how the system of their vehicle, including lane focused, regenerative braking, adaptive cruise control and automated parking, can affect the handling and performance during a road test.”
Caslin did not say if there are specific requirements to use the brake pedal of a vehicle to stop if the regenerative braking is also an option.
Simard said he published about his daughter’s experience in a Facebook group for Ontario Tesla owners, and some people reported that they were well using regenerative braking in their road tests. Others said their examiner asked them to turn off the function.
The Ontario unit test website does not address the question, but talks about another technology: rear view cameras.
The website says that drivers can use their rear camera during their road test, but they must also show good observation skills.
“This means turning the head, verifying the mirrors and looking around while going back,” says the website.
Instructors say that basic skills are important
Saad Tariq, a management instructor and owner of the Great Sudbury Leadership School, said he has no knowledge of any written rule that prohibits the use of assistance technologies in Ontario road tests.
But Tariq said he discourages his students to use such technologies when he is teaching them.
“My vehicles in which I teach do not have blind spot detectors, they have no rear cameras,” he said.
“So you really have to look around and do all the basic skills yourself.”
Tariq said that newer vehicles can be easily covered by snow or land in bad climatic conditions, at which time they no longer work. In those cases, he said, it is especially important that drivers know how to drive their vehicles without them.
Amanda Lacroix, a management instructor at the Northern Lights Management School in the Levack community of Greater Sudbury, said she has feelings found about driver assistance technologies.
She said that the use of driver assistance should be allowed for final road tests, for a driver’s license G, if the car that the individual conducts regularly uses those characteristics.
“If the world is going to change and we will all have assisted driving, then we should be learning to do it correctly.”
But Lacroix said that Saad also agrees that drivers should know how to control their vehicles and properly use their mirrors, even if their vehicles are equipped with the latest technology.
