Looks like it’s back to the drawing board for Tesla. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s Office of Defects Investigation, there has been a look into the performance of FSD or Full Self Driving. And there are many errors to account for.
Such an investigation happened to be motivated by a collective of crashes where Tesla vehicles had operated with Autopilot engaged, but errors ensued under unpredictable situations for a computer, normal circumstances for a human.
NHTSA’s Office of Defects Investigation opened a preliminary investigation into the performance of FSD. The investigation was motivated by an accumulation of crashes in which Tesla vehicles, operating with Autopilot engaged, struck stationary in-road or roadside first responder vehicles tending to pre-existing collision scenes, according to NHTSA. The original preliminary evaluation was later upgraded to an Engineering Analysis (EA) to extend the existing crash analysis, evaluate additional data sets, perform vehicle evaluations, and to explore the degree to which Autopilot and associated Tesla systems may exacerbate human factors or behavioral safety.
This is expected to affect over 362,758 units.
This comes hot off the heels of a handful of incidents that have occurred between May 2019 and September 2022, thanks to certain conditions described. This is much too common to appear as mere coincidence.
Full-Self Driving, as is, affects every one of the Model S, Model X, Model 3 and Model Y computing infrastructures.
In a statement made on their website, Tesla had this to say.
“Your Tesla vehicle is protected by a 4-year warranty. If your Tesla is included in a recall, service to address the issue will be provided for free regardless of age or mileage. Check if your car is affected by a recall.”
The following models in question are affected, in varying degrees.
Model 3 Trunk Lid Harness Retrofit
Model X steering assist motor bolt recall
Model S steering assist motor bolt recall
As it stands, Tesla has to acknowledge that their driving assistant may not be the most state-of-the-art after all.
When someone like Tesla throws around terminology like “full self driving,” what it really means is how there’s the need for a human driver at all times to be ready to take control of a vehicle that may be able to drive amongst local roads with appropriate steering breaking acceleration but may find difficulty in making judgment on an incredibly increasingly dynamic environment.
As per usual, these days, Twitter and sometimes Tesla CEO Elon Musk believes that using “recall” for over the air software adjustments is “flat wrong!”
Well, maybe things wouldn’t go wrong if he had just learned how to handle his companies better.
Nevertheless, Tesla is committed to releasing an OTA or over the air software update for the issue, without a single charge.
Notification letters are being mailed out by April 15th, 2023. Plus, owners themselves are going to have access to reach out to Tesla customer service at 877–798–3752. Additionally? The recall number was SB-23-00-001.
