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Elon Musk’s Tesla has agreed to recall over two million cars in the US after regulators identified a defect with its ‘Autopilot’ software system.
The announcement follows a recall filing by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), which found the advanced driver assistance system controls “may not be sufficient to prevent driver misuse” and could increase the risk of a crash.
The agency has been investigating the Autopilot function for more than two years, where it looked at roughly 1,000 crashes in which the feature was engaged.
“Automated technology holds great promise for improving safety but only when it is deployed responsibly,” a NHTSA spokesperson said. “Today’s action is an example of improving automated systems by prioritising safety.”
The agency claimed that Tesla’s Autopilot system could give drivers a false sense of security and be easily misused in certain dangerous situations. To avoid this, the NHTSA has asked the company to send an “over-the-air software update” that would alert drivers when they are not paying attention to the road while the Autopilot’s ‘Autosteer’ function is turned on.
The software update can happen remotely, and does not require car owners to take their car to any facility. However, the limitations on Autopilot serve as a blow to Tesla’s efforts to make its vehicles more affordable for future customers.
The recall covers models Y, S, 3 and X produced between 5 October 2012 and 7 December 2023 – including almost every Tesla sold in the US since the Autopilot feature was launched in 2015.
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Tesla has said Autopilot enables vehicles to steer, accelerate and brake within their lanes, while ‘Full Self-Driving’ lets vehicles obey traffic signals and change lanes. The company has said both technologies “require active driver supervision,” with a “fully attentive” driver whose hands are on the wheel, “and do not make the vehicle autonomous”.
However, the NHTSA has long expressed doubts regarding whether the company adequately ensures that drivers pay attention when using the driver assistance system.
Tesla said it did not agree with NHTSA’s analysis, but would deploy the required update to “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”.
The recall comes two days after The Washington Post published an investigation into Autopilot. The newspaper found at least eight serious accidents, including some fatalities, in which the Autopilot feature should not have been engaged in the first place.
Tesla responded to the article with a long post on X (the platform formerly known as Twitter), in which it defended the safety of the technology.
“The data is clear: the more automation technology offered to support the driver, the safer the driver and other road users,” it said. “Anecdotes from The Washing Post article come from plaintiff attorneys – cases involving significant driver misuse – and are not a substitute for rigorous analysis and billions of miles of data.”
Tesla – the world’s largest electric vehicle (EV) manufacturer – has had repeated run-ins with federal safety regulators, whom Musk calls “the fun police”. These have included flaws related to rear-view cameras, bonnet latches, seat-belt reminders and the sound system software.
This is also not the first time that NHTSA has pushed Tesla to make changes to its Autopilot or Full Self-Driving features due to safety concerns. Since 2016, NHTSA has opened 38 special investigations of Tesla crashes believed to involve its advanced driver assistance systems, which have led to 19 deaths.
In February of this year, Tesla recalled 362,000 US vehicles to update its Full Self-Driving Beta software after it was found that the vehicles did not adequately adhere to traffic safety laws.
Last year, Tesla announced the recall of nearly 580,000 vehicles in the US because its ‘Boombox’ function can play sounds over an external speaker and obscure audible warnings for pedestrians. The company was also forced to recall almost 1.1 million Tesla vehicles after identifying flaws with the automatic window reversal system that caused windows to pinch people’s fingers.
In 2021, the company recalled around 12,000 Tesla vehicles sold since 2017 over concerns that they could trigger a false forward-collision warning or an unexpected activation of the emergency brakes.
NHTSA’s investigation into Autopilot will remain open as it monitors the efficacy of Tesla’s remedies.
