US regulator asks Tesla to recall 158,000 cars over safety-related defect

MUMBAI: Even as Elon Musk’s Tesla gets ready for its India operations, the electric vehicle maker has hit a roadblock in the US with National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) asking the company to recall about 158,000 cars.

The regulator asked the company to recall Model S and Model X cars between 2012 and 2018 over potential failure of the display consoles. The large central screen on these cars, or the media control unit (MCU) could fail due to its memory storage unit reaching full capacity, NHTSA’s Office of Defects Investigation found.

The failure of the display screen could result in loss of rearview camera as well as impact the Autopilot advanced driver assistance system that Tesla cars come equipped with.


The memory storage units have a finite lifespan and the MCU fails after a certain number of on-off cycles, NHTSA said in a notification. While Tesla has released some over-the-air updates to rectify the issue, the regulator found the measures insufficient.

“NHTSA notes that Tesla has implemented several over-the-air updates in an attempt to mitigate some of the issues described in this letter, but tentatively believes these updates are procedurally and substantively insufficient,” the notification read. “As a matter of Federal law, vehicle manufacturers are required to conduct recalls to remedy safety-related defects.”

Tesla confirmed to NHTSA that all the units would inevitably fail given the memory device’s finite storage capacity. The automaker provided a statistical model that showed the number of projected weekly MCU repairs from 2020 to 2028, estimating that replacement rates for MCU failures will peak in early 2022.

Motherboard had first reported the issue in 2019 after some Tesla cars “bricked” from running out of memory storage. NHTSA started a formal investigation in the matter in June last year.