8:45 am, November 5, 2021
Tesla has recalled close to 12,000 vehicles after a technical fault was discovered that could cause the emergency brakes to suddenly activate.
The American firm also had significant fears that the glitch could lead to a false forward-collision warning, increasing the risk of a rear-end shunt.
As a result, bosses have decided to call back 11,704 Model S, X, 3 and Y vehicles that were made between 2017 and 2021, said the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) in the US.
The issues only relates to cars in Tesla’s limited early access version 10.3 Full-Self Driving (FSD) (Beta) population, following an update on October 23.
No cars in the UK have been recalled, with the safety callback currently limited to the US.
Tesla says the FSD system doesn’t make its cars autonomous but handles a number of different driving tasks.
According to the NHTSA, Tesla ‘uninstalled FSD 10.3 after receiving reports of inadvertent activation of the automatic emergency braking system’.
The firm is then said to have ‘updated the software and released FSD version 10.3.1 to those vehicles affected’, the Guardian reports.
As a result of the issues, Tesla reverted to its previous operating system before updating 99.8 per cent of vehicles affected.
Seeing some issues with 10.3, so rolling back to 10.2 temporarily.
Please note, this is to be expected with beta software. It is impossible to test all hardware configs in all conditions with internal QA, hence public beta.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 24, 2021
The recall is just the latest issue with Tesla’s autopilot driver-assistance system.
Last month, the NHTSA asked the firm why it hadn’t issued a recall to address software updates made to improve vehicles’ ability to detect emergency vehicles.
Tesla said the issue was caused by a ‘software communication disconnect’ between two onboard chips.
However, the firm insisted it wasn’t aware of any crashes or injuries related to the issue.
The NHTSA previously opened a formal safety probe into a separate issue with the autopilot system in 765,000 US vehicles in August.
The investigation came after a series of crashes involving Tesla models and emergency vehicles.
