Toronto, Ontario — Tesla is recalling just over 2 million vehicles in the United States and Canada fitted with its Autopilot advanced driver-assistance system to install new safeguards.
This recall comes after a U.S. safety regulator said that the automaker’s Autopilot system was open to “foreseeable misuse.”
The National Highway Traffic Safety Association (NHTSA) has been investigating Tesla for more than two years over whether or not the automaker’s vehicles adequately ensure that drivers pay attention when using driver assistance systems.
Specifically, the NHTSA initially opened a probe in August, 2021 after identifying more than a dozen crashes in which Tesla vehicles hit stationary emergency vehicles while driver assistance systems were in use.
Separately, since 2016, the NHTSA has opened more than three dozen Tesla special crash investigations in cases where driver systems such as Autopilot were suspected of being used, with 23 crash deaths reported to date.
Tesla said in this current recall filing that Autopilot’s software system controls “may not be sufficient to prevent driver misuse” and this could increase the risk of a crash.
Currently, the automaker’s Autopilot features are intended to enable cars to steer, accelerate and brake automatically within their lane, while enhanced Autopilot can assist in changing lanes on highways but does not make the vehicles autonomous.
Acting NHTSA Administrator Ann Carlson originally told Reuters in August that it’s “really important that driver monitoring systems take into account that humans over-trust technology.”
In a return response, Tesla said that it did not agree with the NHTSA but would deploy 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.”
The company will roll out the update to the over 2 million affected vehicles in models S, X, 3 and Y dating back to the 2012 model year.
The update based on vehicle hardware will include increasing prominence of visual alerts on the user interface, simplifying engagement and disengagement of Autosteer and additional checks upon engaging Autosteer with “eventual suspension from Autosteer use if the driver repeatedly fails to demonstrate continuous and sustained driving responsibility while the feature is engaged,” Tesla said.
The automaker did not provide more specifics about how exactly alerts and safeguards would change or what the timeline on these changes would be.
Currently, in Canada, 193,000 vehicles from the listed Tesla makes are being recalled to date.
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