Tesla in Trouble; 360,000+ Vehicles Recalled

By Dana Malcolm

Staff Writer 

February 24, 2023 – Three hundred and sixty-two thousand Tesla vehicles are being recalled because of an accident risk. The Elon Musk-headed car company said a Full Self-Driving Beta (FSB) software introduced to the cars has the potential to cause road accidents.

According to a National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) document the company reached out with information indicating that the FSD Beta system was disregarding road rules allowing the vehicle to ‘act unsafe’ around intersections.

Affected Teslas could potentially travel straight through an intersection while in a turn-only lane, enter a stop sign-controlled intersection without coming to a complete stop, or drive straight into an intersection during a steady yellow traffic signal ‘without due caution’.

The system is also having issues, responding to speed input including “responding insufficiently to changes in posted speed limits or not adequately accounting for the driver’s adjustment of the vehicle’s speed to exceed posted speed limits”

The glitches pose a serious crash risk should they occur putting pedestrians and motorists in serious danger and affecting models 3, S, X and Y from as far back as 2016.

The recall came on Wednesday three days after The Dawn Project, which describes itself as a safety advocacy group, took out a $598,000 Super Bowl ad denouncing Tesla’s FSD as dangerous; “deceptive marketing” and “woefully inept engineering”.

FSD is a Level 2 Advanced Driver Assistance System which the NHTSA says means it ‘provides both speed and steering input when the driver assistance system is engaged but requires the human driver to remain fully engaged in the driving task at all times.’

Based on the definition it’s easy to see how a car not responding to speed input in time could be catastrophic.

Between July 2021 and January 1,  2023 there were at least 778 crashes with vehicles using Level 2 ADAs the NHTSA says. Crashes are supposed to be reported to the Agency if a Level 2 ADA was in use at any time within 30 seconds of the crash and the crash involved a vulnerable road user or resulted in a fatality, a vehicle tow-away, an airbag deployment, or any individual being transported to a hospital for medical treatment.

Admitting that its data has significant limitations the Agency said so far of the 778 crashes, the vast majority were reported by Tesla.