The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said Friday it is investigating whether Tesla properly handled a recall of more than 2 million cars in December to fix a flaw federal regulators detected in its Autopilot system.
In a notice, the NHTSA said the agency “identified concerns” about the fix deployed by the carmaker due to “post-remedy crash events and results from preliminary NHTSA tests of remedied vehicles.”
The agency did not specify details about the post-fix crashes.
The December recall affected 2,031,220 Teslas—nearly all vehicles sold by the carmaker in the U.S. at the time—and the company delivered its remedy in an automatic software update.
Citing Tesla, the NHTSA said “a portion of the remedy both requires the owner to opt in and allows a driver to readily reverse it.”
The carmaker has also issued further updates to address the concerns that led to the recall and the new investigation will “consider why these updates were not a part of the recall.”
The recall was implemented following a two-year federal investigation into Tesla’s driver-assist features, which were linked to multiple accidents, some fatal. Despite its name, Autopilot is not a fully autonomous driving mode and requires a human driver’s oversight. NHTSA found that Autopilot lacked adequate safeguards to detect if the driver was paying attention while the feature was engaged, calling it “not…sufficient to prevent driver misuse.” The recall affected every Tesla model in the market at the time, including the Model S, Model X, Model 3 and Model Y. The company also said its fix had been incorporated into new cars on Tesla’s production line since December 7.
13. That is the total number of crashes “involving one or more deaths” which the NHTSA determined was caused by the Autopilot flaw which resulted in the recall.
Tesla’s share price has dropped more than 31.5% since the start of the year as the company has been plagued by a stagnation in electric vehicle sales and the botched launch of its newest product, the Cybertruck.
Tesla Recalls More Than 2 Million Cars In U.S. To Fix Autopilot Flaw (Forbes)
Tesla Recalls Nearly 3,900 Cybertrucks Over Gas Pedals That Can Get Stuck—Causing Truck To Accelerate (Forbes)
