In January 2020, CNBC broke a story that Tesla cars "may suddenly accelerate on their own." It was built on a petition to NHTSA asking for a recall of every Model S, X and 3 made since 2013. The man who filed it was, by CNBC's own reporting, shorting Tesla stock at the time. Tesla called the petition "completely false" and said that in every case where it had the car's data, the car did what the driver told it to do. CNBC's follow-up answered that Tesla "provided few details." So NHTSA spent a year on it, reviewing 246 complaints and crash data from 118 of them. In January 2021 the answer came back. In 97% of those crashes the accelerator was pressed to 85% or more, and in 90% there was no braking at all. About half happened in the driver's first six months with the car. NHTSA found "no evidence of any fault in the accelerator pedal assemblies, motor control systems, or brake systems," and denied the petition. A Tesla logs what both pedals are doing, and that record existed before the first headline was written. "On their own" went out anyway, sourced to paperwork from someone betting the stock would fall, and the correction took a federal agency twelve months.