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NHTSA Closes Tesla Smart Summon Probe After Low-Speed Incidents, Citing Software Fixes

Citing rare, low-speed mishaps addressed by over-the-air updates, regulators closed the case.

Overview

  • Tesla’s Smart Summon investigation, which NHTSA closed Monday after a 15-month review, found crashes were low speed and caused only minor property damage.
  • NHTSA documented 159 incidents, including 97 crashes, out of millions of Summon sessions with no injuries, no fatalities, no airbag deployments, and no tow-aways.
  • Tesla issued six over-the-air updates in 2025 that improved camera-blockage detection for snow and condensation, refined responses to moving gate arms, and added an extra object-detection network.
  • Investigators said issues often occurred early in a Summon session when app users lacked a full 360-degree view, with cars striking parked vehicles, garage doors, gates, or bollards, and some cases tied to cameras blocked by snow.
  • The closure covers about 2.585–2.59 million vehicles and does not preclude future action, and a separate Full Self-Driving engineering analysis launched in March now examines roughly 3.2 million cars for degraded-visibility performance.