Feds ramp up investigation into Tesla’s full self-driving (oversight) program.

The top US auto safety regulator is investigating the performance of Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (Supervision) software in low-visibility conditions.

NHTSA Office of Defect Investigation (ODI) He said On Thursday, it updated the probe it launched In October 2024 To what is known as “engineering analysis”, which is the highest level of scrutiny. It’s an often required step before the agency asks a company to issue a recall.

This is one of two investigations ODI is conducting into Tesla’s full (supervised) self-driving program. The organizer is too Investigated more than 80 cases Tesla’s driver assistance software violated basic traffic safety laws, such as running red lights. The investigations come as Tesla has spent months trying to launch a robotaxi service in Austin, Texas.

ODI opened this particular investigation after four incidents were reported in low visibility conditions, one of which resulted in the death of a pedestrian. The regulator has spent the past year and a half exchanging information with Tesla, and appears to have identified a handful of incidents in which the company’s driving software proved insufficient in low-visibility settings.

ODI also said Thursday that it did not get all the information it wanted from Tesla in the process. While Tesla began “developing an update” to fix the low-visibility problems in June 2024 — before opening the investigation — the company has not yet told ODI whether that fix has been deployed, or which vehicles have received it, the investigation office wrote.

ODI also believes there may be underreporting of similar incidents due to data collection and labeling limitations that Tesla reported to the safety agency.

“In the crashes reviewed by ODI, the system did not detect common road conditions that impair camera visibility and/or provide alerts when camera performance deteriorated until immediately before the crash,” the agency wrote. “A review of Tesla’s responses revealed additional incidents that occurred in similar environments and where the system did not detect a deteriorating condition, and/or did not provide the driver with an alert with appropriate time for the driver to react. In each of these incidents, the FSD also lost track of the lead vehicle in its path or never detected it at all.”

This story is evolving. Check back for updates.