Chalk this one up as yet another negative sign for the flailing electric vehicle (EV) industry. Elon Musk has been forced to issue a recall against nearly every Tesla ever made. It’s just the latest setback for an industry that has EVs piling up and collecting dust on car lots across the country. The good news for Tesla owners is that a simple software upgrade should fix the problem. The bad news is that when they get their EVs back, they will no longer have all the fancy autopilot self-robo-driving features that they used to.
According to MotorTrend, the recall will affect “certain Autosteer-equipped Model S vehicles produced between October 5, 2012, and December 7, 2023, and then every single Autosteer-equipped Model 3, Model Y, and Model X produced since 2016.”
That’s almost every single one of the 2 million Teslas that have ever been sold in the United States. The problem was identified after a two-year investigation by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
The NHTSA looked at nearly 1,000 crashes that have happened when the drivers had their Tesla’s Autopilot feature engaged. It turns out that Autopilot and Full Self Driving Mode are simply not working out the way that everyone—especially Elon Musk—had hoped.
According to the release from the NHTSA, the upgrade to the vehicles will now require a few extra actions for drivers who want to use Full Self Driving Mode. This includes keeping their hands on the steering wheel at 10:00 and 2:00, staying awake, watching the road, accelerating the vehicle with the gas pedal or slowing it with the brake pedal, and actually driving the vehicle.
New features of the Oops-Not-Exactly-Full-Self-Driving-Mode after the recall upgrades will include additional safety alerts on the user interface, simplifying engagement and disengagement of Autosteer, and not allowing the feature to be used at all when the vehicle is not on an approved highway.
Elon Musk has been promising that he really means it this time about the Full Self Driving Mode since 2016. Here we are eight years later, and he still can’t get “monitored self-driving” to work unless the driver actually remains in control of the vehicle. He’s not the only one in the industry that’s having these woes with his supposed AI self-driving system.
In October, a driverless Chevy Bolt called Panini ran over some woman in San Francisco. Instead of just stopping where it was with the poor lady sandwiched underneath the vehicle, Panini then started driving again. It dragged the poor lady another 20 feet and then stopped against the curb. Firefighters had to use the jaws of life to save her.
There have been 128 EV crashes this year in California alone. A GM Cruise AV ran into a fire truck; another one smashed into a bus. A Google Waymo delayed a firefighter trying to respond to an emergency call for seven minutes. A GM Cruise Origin slammed into a building, and then it couldn’t be removed since it didn’t even have a steering wheel. Another Waymo murdered some poor family’s dog, and another GM Cruise AV got stuck in wet concrete that wasn’t even on the street.
Uber’s autonomous Volvo killed some poor lady in Arizona in 2018, which prompted the company to completely abandon its autopilot program. At least the people running Uber seem to have a conscience.
The rest of the EV industry seems as hellbent as the pharmaceutical companies were with the COVID “vaccines.” There are acceptable losses of human life that they’re willing to put up with. It looks like we don’t need to worry about AI taking over and destroying human life, at least not within the next few years. At this point, it can’t even drive a car.
