On Friday, U.S. auto safety regulators said they have initiated an investigation into Tesla’s recall of over 2 million vehicles in December to install new Autopilot safeguards and find out whether it’s adequate to put the safety concerns to rest.
According to the National Highway Traffic Administration (NHTSA), they opened the probe after the agency identified concerns due to crash events involving vehicles with software updates, supplemented by the results from preliminary NHTSA tests of remedied vehicles.
Tesla stated, “A portion of the remedy both requires the owner to opt in and allows a driver to readily reverse it”. This statement was cited by NHTSA during their probe. The agency revealed that Tesla had issued software updates to rectify issues but had not made them “a part of the recall or otherwise determined to remedy a defect that poses an unreasonable safety risk.”
In December, Tesla announced that its largest-ever recall of 2.03 million U.S. vehicles or broadly, all its vehicles on U.S. roads was intended to make drivers more mindful about using its advanced driver assistance system. Tesla also said that the software system controls “may not be sufficient to prevent driver misuse” and could potentially increase the risk of a crash.
The new recall investigation is concerned with Model Y, X, S, 3 and Cybertruck vehicles in the U.S., equipped with Autopilot manufactured between the 2012 and 2024 model years, NHTSA stated.
The auto safety agency noted that when it first launched its Autopilot safety probe in August 2021, it identified at least 13 Tesla crashes involving fatal injuries in which “foreseeable driver misuse of the system played an apparent role.”
Consumer Reports, a nonprofit organisation that evaluates products and services, reported that Tesla’s Autopilot recall update found changes unsatisfactory when measured against the safety concerns raised by NHTSA and nudged the agency to take stronger steps. According to them, Tesla’s recall “addresses minor inconveniences rather than fixing the real problems.”
Tesla’s Autopilot enables cars to steer, accelerate and brake automatically within their lane while enhanced Autopilot can assist in changing lanes on highways but does not make vehicles autonomous. Autosteer is one of the components of Autopilot which maintains a set speed for a particular distance and works to keep a vehicle in its driving lane.
Although Tesla disagreed with NHTSA’s analysis, it nonetheless deployed an over-the-air software update that will “incorporate additional controls and alerts to those already existing on affected vehicles to further encourage the driver to adhere to their continuous driving responsibility whenever Autosteer is engaged.”