The recall campaign was the result of an investigation by the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), launched in 2021 due to a series of accidents, which involved Tesla electric vehicles in autopilot mode.
Officials from NHTSA have already “punished” Tesla for the fact that their so-called Autopilot violates traffic rules: hundreds of thousands of cars were recalled to bring the Autopilot algorithms into compliance with the law — the problem was solved by updating the software. The recall announced this week is the most widespread for Tesla; in the US it will affect 2,031,220 Tesla Model S, Model X, Model 3 and Model Y electric vehicles; the solution will also “arrive” in each car itself as part of the next software update package.
In this case, NHTSA's complaint against Tesla is that it does not sufficiently encourage drivers to constantly monitor the operation of Autopilot, which is why various accidents, including fatal ones, have occurred and continue to occur. Tesla did not agree with NHTSA's findings, but agreed to conduct a recall campaign to close the investigation that lasted more than two years and not lead the conflict with the authorities to more severe consequences for Tesla.
The inexperienced reader will be surprised — they say, why control the autopilot? Then, even the most advanced version of autopilot — Tesla FSD — is not an autopilot from a legal point of view: formally, it is an advanced driver assistant of the second level according to the SAE classification, in which the driver must constantly monitor the road. Until now, Tesla allowed drivers to be quite free with system warnings about the need to control the operation of the autopilot and put their hands on the steering wheel, but now such warnings, firstly, will be more intrusive, and secondly, if they are maliciously ignored, the autopilot will simply turn off . How all this will work in practice is still unclear; Tesla customers have not yet received a software update related to the recall.
From a technical point of view, the Tesla FSD is capable of completely independently driving a route of any complexity on public roads , but the responsibility for his mistakes in any case lies with the living person sitting behind the wheel.
Mercedes-Benz has already legalized a level three autopilot according to the SAE classification in Germany and a number of US states: it allows the driver, under favorable conditions when driving on a highway, to take his hands off the wheel and not watch the road, but there are so many restrictions in the operation of such an autopilot that it is difficult to use it is impossible for them on a regular basis, and the speed can not be higher than 64 km/h. In addition, the Mercedes-Benz autopilot is equipped much more generously with hardware than the Tesla autopilot, which is why it received permission to operate from the German and US authorities. The Tesla FSD autopilot focuses mainly on information from all-round cameras; it does not have safety or backup equipment, so Tesla cannot yet certify its autopilot above the second level according to the SAE classification.
We will add that Elon Musk dreamed of making Tesla's most budget model (it should debut in the coming years) completely self-driving, without a steering wheel or pedals in the cabin, but reality forced the greatest innovative entrepreneur on planet Earth to abandon this idea.