The federal government's automotive safety watchdog has taken the unusual step of asking 12 major automakers to assist its investigation into a series of crashes in which Tesla vehicles have struck parked police cars and fire trucks while Tesla's driver assistance systems were activated.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) said it has written General Motors, Toyota, Ford, Volkswagen and others because it wants to perform a "comparative analysis" of Tesla's systems against other "production vehicles equipped with the ability to control both steering and braking/accelerating simultaneously under some circumstances."

Most automakers today offer adaptive cruise control and other driver assistance systems in conjunction with lane-centering technology. With the exception of GM's Super Cruise and Ford's upcoming BlueCruise, these systems require drivers to keep their hands on the wheel. Tesla Autopilot likewise will allow a vehicle to steer, accelerate and brake automatically within its lane, and likewise Tesla advises drivers to keep their hands on the wheel. But in many cases, including in Consumer Report testing, the system has been easily tricked, allowing a driver to keep hands off the wheel for extended periods — or even to abandon the driver's seat altogether, as CR was able to do on a closed course, and as have Tesla owners in real-world traffic.

In August, NHTSA opened a formal investigation into Tesla's systems after 12 crashes into emergency vehicles, in which police or fire crews were responding to crashes or rendering assistance, with their emergency lights flashing. NHTSA said it had reports of 17 injuries and one death in the 12 crashes.

The probe covers the 765,000 U.S. Tesla vehicles built between 2014 and 2021.

Also in August, two U.S. senators called on the Federal Trade Commission to investigate Tesla's use of the terms "Autopilot" and "Full Self Driving" as being deceptive to its customers, and risking "serious injury or death."

In its letter, NHTSA asked the other automakers to list any crashes in which their driver assists were engaged at "anytime during the period beginning 30 seconds immediately prior to the commencement of the crash."

The agency also wants to know how other automakers' systems ensure that drivers pay attention and have hands on the wheel. The OEMs have until November to gather that data.

NHTSA also asked for details on automakers' "strategies for detecting and responding to the presence of first responder / law enforcement vehicles." Until now, it has seemed as if Tesla was unique in this vulnerability, as if its systems were confused or even attracted to emergency lights. But it will be interesting to see what other automakers report on that count.

On Aug. 31 NHTSA sent Tesla a 11-page letter with numerous questions it must answer by Oct. 22.

NHTSA has sent investigative teams to 31 crashes involving partially automated driver assist systems since June 2016. Such systems can keep a vehicle centered in its lane and a safe distance from vehicles in front of it. Of those crashes, 25 involved Tesla Autopilot in which 10 deaths were reported, according to data released by the agency. Some of those crashes were into the undersides of crossing semis, or into road barriers.

Earlier this month, NHTSA confirmed it was also investigating a July 26 fatal crash in New York of a 52-year-old man was struck by a Tesla as he was attempting to fix a flat tire on his vehicle.

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Tesla's monthly export volume of China-built vehicles hit a record high of 31,379 units in August, which accounted for 71% of Tesla's total wholesales of China-made cars.Tesla said last month that it has shifted its “export hub” from Fremont Factory to Shanghai Gigafactory.

“Due to strong U.S. demand and global average cost optimization, we have completed the transition of Gigafactory Shanghai as the primary vehicle export hub,” Tesla stated in its Q2 2021 results.

Meanwhile, Tesla is speeding up the localization progress for the Shanghai factory. By the end of 2020, 86% of auto parts for Tesla's vehicles made in Shanghai were locally sourced in China.

If you were hoping to score a few thousand Supercharging miles from Tesla referrals, we're afraid you may already be too late. In a notice on its website spotted by Electrek, Tesla said that "vehicle products and solar panels are no longer eligible for Referral awards" as of September 18th. The company's only active program at the moment is for the Solar Roof, which awards referrers with monetary rewards of up to $500 and free Powerwalls.

Tesla's referral program has changed tremendously over the years. The automaker used to promise new Roadsters for top referrers and up to six months of free Supercharging. That eventually became too expensive to be sustainable, so the company decided to axe the program. Tesla introduced a new one with more reasonable rewards shortly after that, though, promising at least 1,000 miles of free Supercharging.

When it relaunched the program with updated terms, the company said that it "heard from... customers that the Referral Program was one of their favorite reasons to tell their friends about Tesla." It's unclear if it would come back again this time for the same reason, but we wouldn't be surprised if it does. Take note, however, that Tesla has yet to fulfill some of its bigger promises to referrers. As Electrek notes, it hasn't delivered the Roadsters its top referrers earned yet, and people have been complaining on online forums about not receiving free Powerwalls and other rewards from years ago.

After Jennifer Homendy became the chair of the NTSB (National Transportation Safety Board), we knew Tesla would be under even more scrutiny. The entity has been urging the company to adopt a safer approach with its autonomous driving quest for a long time. However, Tesla mostly ignored it because the NTSB has no enforcement authority. In an interview with the WSJ (Wall Street Journal), Homendy spared no words about how Tesla names its Level 2 beta software.
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The NTSB chair classified “Full Self-Driving” as “misleading and irresponsible.” Although the reasons should be obvious, she meant that the feature is not self-driving and is not even full. No current technology is, and specialists even dispute there will ever be a Level 5 autonomous vehicle, which would require no intervention and would work anywhere. To make matters worse, Musk keeps telling fans that Tesla vehicles are autonomous, as he did in a recent tweet. To authorities, Tesla claims they are only Level 2, which exempts the company from requiring test authorizations.

Homendy also said that Tesla “has clearly misled numerous people to misuse and abuse technology.” That’s an evident reference to the multiple accidents involving Autopilot. NTSB investigated at least one involving deaths. On March 23, 2018, Walter Huang died in a crash against a concrete barrier in California. NTSB’s investigation determined that the driver had an overreliance on Autopilot: he was playing a game on his smartphone.

That was not the first fatal crash in which Autopilot was involved. On May 7, 2016, Joshua Brown’s Model S drove under a tractor-trailer in Florida. More recently, on May 5, 2021, Steven Michael Hendrickson’s Model 3 crashed with an overturned truck in California.

Apart from these collisions, Tesla’s Autopilot is now being investigated by NTHSA (National Highway Traffic Safety Administration) for crashing 11 times with emergency vehicles. Soon after the agency announced its probe, another Tesla slammed an FHP Orlando patrol car.

WSJ interviewed Homendy soon after Elon Musk disclosed the company would expand FSD to more customers by the end of September. He also said that only customers with a good driving record would get the ADAS (advanced driver-assistance system). However, it is not clear how Tesla will decide about that.

Homendy said that Tesla must address "basic safety issues” before “expanding it to other city streets and other areas." They are probably the ones NTSB said Tesla should take care of back in 2017: adding more safeguards to make it more difficult for drivers to misuse ADAS. Tesla was the only company that did not respond to NTSB about these suggestions.

Before Han Chao bought his certified used Model S P85 on June 1, 2019, Tesla told him it was never involved in any crashes and that it was approved in 200 tests. Despite that, the Chinese customer had so many issues with the vehicle that he decided to have it inspected. The car had been in a wreck and got its C-pillar replaced. After suing Tesla, Chinese justice granted Chao his money back, plus three times that value as compensation. Tesla owes him RMB1,518,800 ($235,248) for fraud, and this is the final decision.

Chao’s situation deserves a more detailed description. On June 5, right after he picked up the car, he had to take it to the Tianjin Tesla Service Center for repairs. He did that five more times until his car stopped working at 120 kph (75 mph) on a road. Chao said he heard a loud noise, five fault codes appeared on the dashboard, and the accelerator pedal died. Luckily, he managed to take the car to the roadside without causing a crash.

At this point, Chao thought the car was dangerous and tried to get his money back in a friendly way. He first asked Tesla for a refund. After he was denied, Chao contacted the Market Supervision and Administration Bureau to mediate the negotiation. Thanks to the consumer agency’s suggestion, he took his car to Wanfeng Motor Vehicle Appraisal on November 15, 2019. The company determined that his car had had its original left C-pillar and left rear fender cut and replaced. Contrary to what Tesla told him, that meant that the vehicle had crashed before.

The Chinese customer had to fix the car three other times after the road incident, bringing the total number of repairs to ten. With Tesla’s refusal to give him his money back, he tried to sue the EV maker in Tianjin. However, Tesla’s headquarters are in Beijing, and the company filed a jurisdiction dispute. To speed up the process, Chao filed a lawsuit in Beijing on March 10, 2020. Beijing is 114 kilometers (71 miles) away from Tianjin.

The lawsuit had some weird episodes. Tesla first disputed the appraisal and asked for a new one. When the result stated that the repairs affected the vehicle’s safety and depreciation, Tesla called the service “unprofessional.”

The company presented documents from the previous owner confirming the car had been in an accident. However, Tesla tried to prove the damage was not structural. If it were, the only possible repair would be to replace the entire frame. On top of that, Tesla said that it did not know anything about the fix. The company thought that this would dismiss the fraud accusation, but it didn’t. According to Tesla, cutting and welding new parts to the car made it safer than the original vehicle.

The strategy did not pay off for Tesla. On December 4, 2020, the company was convicted in the first instance. Beijing courts said Tesla had the objective responsibility to know the true conditions of the car. Presenting it as spotless constituted fraud, regardless of intention or not. With the decision, Tesla would have to give Chao the RMB379,700 ($58,812 at the current exchange rate) plus RMB1,139,100 ($176,436) – the penalty for fraud is paying three times what you earned as a compensation – but it still had the option to appeal.


The company did that on December 6, 2020. According to Chao, Tesla brought two experts to the court, and neither of them inspected the vehicle: they only checked the pictures Tesla provided. Both missed the same letter on the vehicle’s license plate in their reports, which Chao found suspicious. The final ruling came out on September 16, 2021, and still gave Chao reason. He celebrated his victory on Weibo.

This is not the first time Tesla has been blamed for trying to deceive customers when selling used cars. In the U.S. and Norway, it has been accused of lemon laundering. The company used to name multiple warranty repairs as goodwill. That strategy would help it cheat on financial results and avoid the application of lemon laws in many states.

In financial terms, framing warranty repairs as goodwill would allow Tesla to include them as “Operating Expenses.” If they were considered warranty repairs, they would have to be listed as “Cost of Revenue,” which affects net income and gross profit calculations.


Regarding lemon laws, they require automakers to repurchase cars after a certain number of warranty repairs that do not work. If they are considered goodwill, Tesla can argue that it only performed them to please the customer, not because they were necessary. Apart from that, saying warranty repairs were goodwill exempts Tesla from reporting them to NHTSA if there are too many fixes for the same issue.

The last benefit of not classifying a car as a lemon is that you can resell it without informing the next customer about its issues because it has no lemon title. At least three Norwegian customers were affected by that Tesla strategy: Ola Spakmo, Jens Petter Lund Sommerlade, and Marius Andrè Langø. Add Han Chao to that list as a foreign customer that managed to enforce his consumer rights in a way Tesla will never forget.

GLENDALE, Calif. (AP) — A woman who apparently passed out while her Tesla was on Autopilot and hit a Southern California freeway wall was arrested on suspicion of drunken driving, authorities said.

Karla Villanueva, 31, was arrested late Thursday in the Los Angeles suburb of Glendale. She was released Friday on her own recognizance pending a January court date, according to the jail information website of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.

It wasn’t immediately clear whether Villanueva had an attorney to speak on her behalf.

At about 11 p.m. Thursday, the Tesla hit a wall on an overhead transition roadway from State Route 134 to Interstate 5 and then continued to move until a California Highway Patrol car pulled in front of the car, which then slowed and stopped, authorities said.

Villanueva’s husband reported that his wife “is unconscious in a Tesla. The vehicle is driving itself,” according to audio from a dispatch call obtained by KABC-TV.


The husband was following the Tesla in a Volkswagen, the dispatcher said.

“Again, apparently the wife is unconscious in the vehicle,” the dispatcher said. “And I guess there’s vehicles in front of it, that’s what’s causing the vehicle to slow down.”

CHP officers then woke up the driver, who was arrested after a DUI test.

An email seeking comment from Tesla wasn’t immediately returned Friday evening.

Autopilot, which can keep vehicles in their lanes and stop for obstacles in front of them, has frequently been misused by Tesla drivers. They have been caught driving drunk or even riding in the back seat while a car rolled down a California highway.

Tesla and other manufacturers warn that drivers using their partially automated driving systems must be ready to intervene at all times.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has opened a formal investigation into Tesla’s Autopilot system after a series of collisions with parked emergency vehicles. The investigation covers 765,000 vehicles, almost everything that Tesla has sold in the U.S. since the start of the 2014 model year. Of the 12 crashes identified by the NHTSA as part of the probe, 17 people were injured and one was killed.

The National Transportation Safety Board, which also has investigated some of the Tesla crashes dating to 2016, has recommended that NHTSA and Tesla limit Autopilot’s use to areas where it can safely operate. The NTSB also recommended that NHTSA require Tesla to have a better system to make sure drivers are paying attention. NHTSA has not taken action on any of the recommendations. The NTSB has no enforcement powers and can only make recommendations to other federal agencies.