Physical Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
In 2016, Elon Musk promised that Tesla owners would be able to “summon” their vehicle from anywhere, even with a car in New York comes to its driver in Los Angeles. In 2025, Tesla’s summoning technology is under investigation because it continues to crash into seats and parked cars. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration announced Tuesday that will launch a probe into 2.6 million Tesla vehicles for security problems related to the “Actually Smart Summon” feature.
The preliminary evaluation of Tesla’s remote driving feature follows several reports of accidents involving Smart Summon and Actually Smart Summon. According to NHTSA’s Office of Defect Investigation (ODI), the probe will look at the maximum speed a vehicle can travel while being remotely controlled, connectivity delays that occur when a vehicle is being summoned, and whether the software Tesla’s self-driving car can navigate pretty much anywhere. environments in which it is used.
A brief history of Summon, which has had a checkered history for Tesla: A version of the function has been available in Tesla vehicles equipped with the company’s dubiously named “Full Self-Driving Capability” (FSD) since 2016. In theory, the technology. it is designed to allow a driver to call their vehicle to come to them, allowing them to navigate autonomously without a person in the vehicle. Initially, it only worked to recall a car from a street or parking lot.
It finally arrived upgraded to Smart Summon in 2019, which allowed the vehicle to navigate more complex situations and to recall a car up to 200 feet. After missing many (many) self-imposed deadlines from Musk, Tesla has finally introduced its own Actually Smart Summon (abbreviated to I sigh ASS) at the end of last year. To use ASS, car owners must press and hold a button in the Tesla app while the car is operating autonomously — an effort to get the owner to monitor the car to make sure it doesn’t crash. The function was panned as slow and inefficient.
He is now being investigated for causing accidents. According to the NHTSA, there is only one official report of an accident involving a version of the Summon software, but there have been at least three media reports of similar accidents and 12 reports of crashes related to the software that have come to Vehicle Owners. Questionnaires. Of the 16 total reports on NHTSA’s radar, Tesla has shared exactly zero of them with the agency despite the requirements for crashes involving Automated Driving Systems to be reported.
Musk probably isn’t sweating it too much — part of his whole effort to befriend President-elect Donald Trump has been to lobby for the rollback of accident reporting requirements for autonomous vehicles. It seems likely that he will get his wish, and there is a non-zero chance that this investigation will be closed before it actually begins.
Although this probe was shut down by the incoming administration, it hasn’t exactly been a banner year for Tesla’s autonomous technology. The NHTSA opened an investigation in the company’s Full Self-Driving system last year after a series of high-profile crashes that allegedly involved the technology. The company has recalled its Autopilot technology in more than two million cars by 2023, and the NHTSA is always examining whether his corrections were really sufficient to address the risks associated with the software. The Justice Department, meanwhile, is still in the process determine whether Tesla misled consumers and investors with how it announced its self-driving features.
