— The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is investigating traffic violations that occur when Tesla vehicles are in “Full Self-Driving” (FSD) mode.
Safety regulators want to know how Tesla FSD operates in traffic and what possible violations there are while FSD is activated. This includes when a vehicle fails to stop at an intersection, even when a red traffic light is activated.
In addition, NHTSA is investigating how Tesla FSD technology causes the vehicle to change lanes into oncoming traffic.
The Tesla FSD traffic violation survey includes nearly 2.9 million vehicles equipped with FSD (Supervised) or FSD (Beta).
Tesla warns customers FSD is only partial automation and still requires a driver to be fully involved in driving. This is a topic that has caused Tesla problems, namely advertising something like “Full Self-Driving” and then adding “Supervised” or “Beta” to the sentence.
According to Tesla, FSD is a “Level 2 partial automation system that requires a fully attentive driver involved in the driving task at all times.”
According to NHTSA:
“The driver remains fully responsible for the operation of the vehicle at all times, including compliance with applicable traffic laws. ODI’s investigation will therefore focus in particular on whether certain driving inputs within FSD’s control authority interfere with the driver’s supervision when performed unexpectedly.”
The government is aware of several incidents where FSD ‘encouraged’ the vehicles to violate traffic laws.
As for Tesla FSD sending vehicles through red traffic lights at intersections, NHTSA says six crashes have been reported, with four of those crashes causing one or more injuries.
Safety regulators have already found evidence that a specific intersection in Joppa, Maryland seemed to be causing the FSD a real problem. NHTSA found multiple FSD traffic violations and incidents occurred at this one intersection, some repeatedly.
Tesla has already made changes to the FSD for this one intersection in Joppe alone.
There have also been 18 complaints and two media reports claiming that vehicles with FSD enabled ‘entered opposite lanes during or after a turn, crossed double yellow lane markings while driving straight ahead, or attempted to enter a road in the wrong direction despite the presence of wrong-way traffic signs.
The investigation will also seek to determine why Tesla FSD traffic violations included vehicles driving through intersections in turn-only lanes, or the vehicles making turns at intersections when lane markings and traffic signals should not allow them to do so.
CarComplaints.com will update our website with the results of the Tesla FSD traffic violation survey.
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