Tesla Recalls 2 Million Cars to Fix Autopilot Safety Flaws
Tesla Recalls 2 Million Cars to Fix Autopilot Safety Flaws
Tesla Inc. filed a recall covering more than 2 million vehicles after the top US auto-safety regulator determined its driver-assistance system Autopilot doesn’t do enough to prevent misuse.
Article is paywalled. Is this an OTA update or a true recall where you have to take the vehicle in?
There really needs to be a differentiation. I’ve had a Tesla for years and seen about a dozen articles about recalls, but have never had a hardware issue. All of the software issues are updated automatically when I’m on a Wi-Fi network and are usually done way before I hear about the “recall”.
If I need to take my car in for a hardware issue, I want to know as soon as possible.
Wtf? They honestly shouldn’t be able to call a software update a “recall.” They’re literally two different things. Is this just a Tesla thing, or is this some sort of new trend?
Indeed, there was a time when they would just fix things without calling them "recalls".
Then, the government claimed that it was illegal for the company to update things like this — even over-the-air — without also calling them "recalls" and going through this exercise.
As another user said, it sounds like this is a NHTSA term:
https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/rcl/2023/RCLRPT-23V838-8276.PDF
tesla has had numerous hardware recalls as well. The whole industry does, it's absolutely normal. It is in fact the point of the recall system. Identify and repair defects before they cause massive harm.
I wouldn't differentiate between OTA and bring-to-the-shop recalls, I'd draw the line between defect repair and threat to life and safety. If the OTA update keeps the car from killing the passengers or pedestrians, It's probably not a good idea to minimize the flaw through semantics.
It’s mostly about whether the problem gets fixed before I know it’s there. If I have to go in to a service center to fix the problem, it is a far greater inconvenience and a longer time it is a risk before I get a day off work to take care of it… which increases the chance I have an issue.
Software patches are still fixes, but they aren’t recalling any parts or vehicles, they are fixing them instantly and remotely.
Here you go
Unpaywalled
Disappointing article. The Associated Press’s is better:
Philip Koopman, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon University who studies autonomous vehicle safety, called the software update a compromise that doesn’t address a lack of night vision cameras to watch drivers’ eyes, as well as Teslas failing to spot and stop for obstacles.
“The compromise is disappointing because it does not fix the problem that the older cars do not have adequate hardware for driver monitoring,” Koopman said.
Koopman and Michael Brooks, executive director of the nonprofit Center for Auto Safety, contend that crashing into emergency vehicles is a safety defect that isn’t addressed. “It’s not digging at the root of what the investigation is looking at,” Brooks said. “It’s not answering the question of why are Teslas on Autopilot not detecting and responding to emergency activity?”
Koopman said NHTSA apparently decided that the software change was the most it could get from the company, “and the benefits of doing this now outweigh the costs of spending another year wrangling with Tesla.”
Or perhaps tesla could deliver a functional 'full self driving' system that drives itself fully?
Stay tuned, it's coming in 2016!
Still 18 days left for them to ram the pre-alpha into
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