Getty Images / Jonathan Gitlin
It’s official: Tesla has to recall nearly 135,000 electric models S and X within four years of driving due to a design flaw that blocks the electric car’s infotainment screens. The recall concerns Model S sedans built between 2012 and 2018, as well as Model X SUVs built between 2016 and 2018, and owners should be notified by the automaker in the month of March.
The problem, which we first addressed in November 2020, has been well known to Tesla owners for a while. The problem is caused by an 8GB eMMC NAND flash memory chip mounted on the Media Control Unit of the brand’s Nvidia Tegra 3 powered infotainment systems. Each time the car is in use, logs are written to the flash memory, which soon reaches its useful life; once this limit is reached, the touchscreen dies, removing the legally mandated reversing camera and defrost / defroster buttons and the external turn signal lights. (The issue does not affect more recent models S or X that use Intel’s Apollo Lake processor; those models also use a 64GB eMMC.)
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration began a preliminary investigation into the issue in June 2020 and then moved it up to technical analysis in November 2020. In mid-January 2021, the regulator concluded that the loss of these features had risen to the level of safety. defects and asked Tesla to recall the vehicles. In late January, the automaker pushed back, “explaining its view that the eMMC wear condition is not a defect and does not pose an unreasonable risk to safety.”
However, the NHTSA disagreed, and on January 29, Tesla agreed to a voluntary recall, which will replace a daughter board in the Media Control Unit with a new one that uses the 64GB eMMC memory.