Customers view an electric car from Tesla Motors Inc. Model X on display at the company’s showroom in Shanghai, China on Tuesday, September 12, 2017.
Qilai Shen | Bloomberg | Getty Images
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) on Wednesday asked Tesla in a letter to recall 158,716 of its Model S and Model X vehicles produced before 2019, after owners complained of touchscreen failures that led to the loss of various safety-related functions.
The affected cars, made at Tesla’s Fremont, California auto plant, include Tesla Model S sedans made between 2012 and 2018, and Model X SUVs in model years from 2016 to 2018.
Tesla can refuse to implement the recall, but would have to submit a full explanation of why to NHTSA, who could then propose further action. A recall of 158,716 vehicles would represent approximately 10% of Tesla’s reported production through the end of 2020. Tesla produced its millionth electric car in March 2020, CEO Elon Musk tweeted at the time, and in the last three quarters of 2020 the company produced more than 400,000 additional vehicles.
News of the letter was previously reported by Reuters.
The memory devices in some Tesla MCUs have a limited ‘write cycle’, meaning that they – and thus the media control unit itself – will not function properly or at all after reaching a certain number of program or erase cycles. .
Owners of affected Tesla vehicles previously told CNBC that the display on their media control units (or MCUs) would sometimes go completely or partially blank. The touchscreen issues made it difficult for drivers to use heating, air conditioning, defrosting and demisting systems in their cars, or using their rear view cameras and Tesla Autopilot functions while parking and driving.
In the letter, sent to Tesla’s vice president of legal Al Prescott, the federal vehicle safety authority wrote that Tesla’s MCU issues could increase drivers’ risk of a crash due to Tesla Autopilot’s “ possible loss of audible chime, driver detection and warnings. ” , the company’s advanced driver assistance system.
Media control unit failure rates were as high as 17% in older Tesla Model S vehicles (made from 2012 to 2015) and as high as 4% for cars made by Tesla from 2016 to 2018, the letter said. And MCU failures are expected to increase as cars age and remain in use, NHTSA said, citing Tesla projections.
Considering Tesla’s projects of MCU repairs, even MY [model year] Vehicles from 2018 will experience 100% MCU failure within approximately 10 years, ”wrote NHTSA researchers.
Tesla previously offered a “warranty extension” to mitigate customers upset by the defect. As CNBC reported at the time, some owners who paid out of pocket for media control unit replacement could recoup their costs under the extended warranty.
Read the full letter from NHTSA to Tesla.