The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), which is the US agency in charge of regulating road safety revealed on Friday that they are probing Tesla’s self-driving software systems.
Tech billionaire, Elon Musk owns Tesla.
BBC reports that the evaluation by the NHTSA covers 2.4 million Tesla vehicles across multiple models manufactured between 2016 and 2024.
It said NHTSA’s action is the first step toward any potential recall that the agency might seek against the company.
NHTSA’s preliminary evaluation follows four crash reports involving the use of Tesla’s “Full Self-Driving”, or FSD, software.
The agency said the crashes involved reduced roadway visibility, with fog or glares from the sun.
One of the incidents involved a Tesla fatally striking a pedestrian, and another involved someone being injured, NHTSA said.
The evaluation aims to determine if Tesla’s self-driving systems can detect and appropriately respond to reduced visibility conditions. It also will examine if other self-driving crashes have happened under similar conditions.
In its notice, the agency noted that despite the label, full self-driving is actually “a partial driving automation system.”
NHTSA’s announcement comes one week after Musk’s glitzy rollout of the Cybercab at the Warner Bros. studio lot in Burbank, California.
At the event, Musk said the fully autonomous robotaxi concept, which operates without pedals or a steering wheel, would be on the market by 2027.
But some analysts and investors were unimpressed. The company’s stock is down eight percent since the Cybercab rollout. Shares were mostly steady after the notice from NHTSA.
Unlike Waymo, the self-driving venture operated by Google-parent Alphabet, Tesla’s autonomous systems rely largely on cameras and artificial intelligence.
Musk’s approach costs less than deploying high-tech sensors like Lidar and radar, which are critical to Waymo’s driverless car programme.
