The electric car manufacturer Tesla had to issue a massive recall this month to fix faulty hood latches that can open while its cars are driving. The problem affects more than 1.8 million cars, which means it’s slightly smaller than the recall in December that applied to more than 2 million Teslas.
The problem, according to the official National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s Part 573 safety recall report, affects model year 2021–2024 Model 3s (built between September 21, 2020, and June 2, 2024), model year 2021–2024 Model Ss (built between January 26, 2021, and July 15, 2024), model year 2021–2024 Model Xs (built between August 18, 2021, and July 15, 2024), and model year 2020–2024 Model Ys (built between January 9, 2020, and July 15, 2024).
The problem first became apparent to Tesla in March of this year after complaints about unintended hood opening from Chinese customers. By April, it had identified the problem as deformation of the hood latch switch, “which could prevent the customer from being notified about an open hood state.”
Although the problem is with the hood latch, as with many Tesla safety recalls, the problem can be fixed with an over-the-air software patch. The new software is able to detect if the hood is open and, if so, will display a warning to the driver to alert them to stop their vehicle and secure the hood.
The new software is able to detect if the hood is open and, if so, will display a warning to the driver to alert them to stop their vehicle and secure the hood
This should not be legal. They should be forced to recall vehicles and replace the faulty part instead of kindly asking drivers to pull over when the part fails.
The shit this company gets away with is astounding.
Driving on the highway
Hood pops open. Can’t see anything. Try to brake but crash.
⚠️ Warning! Your hood is open. Please pull over in a safe location and secure your hood.
Tesla: OTA update successful
Yup. No reason to rewrite the playbook.
“Full self driving” detects an imminent collision of it’s own doing. Car beeps and shuts off “full self driving”
Human was “in control” at the time of the crash, not our fault.
That’s not what they’re saying. It’s essentially a “door ajar” warning. The sensor is what’s failing, rather than the physical part.
Isn’t a sensor… A physical part???
Not if it can be fixed with an update, that’s a software issue.
But it’s not. If you read the article it literally states it’s due to not closing because of deformation of the hood latch switch. Which is a physical object. Sure, you can get a notification now that the thing is open, but guess what, if it flops open while driving, I’ll probably already know that.
And if you’d read it, you’d notice they specifically say it’s the hood latch switch, and not the latch itself, that is deformed. It doesn’t pop open on its own, it falsely detects that the hood is properly closed when it actually isn’t, so it doesn’t warn the driver to go close it before driving off.
There’s no need to do a physical recall if Tesla can bodge some other way to detect the hood is still open and tell the driver to close it.
It’s not the actual latch that’s faulty, but the warning the driver should get, if they haven’t closed the frunk properly.
Is a frunk a front trunk, or is that a typo?
Front trunk, yeah
The latch is fault, and so is the sensor. Sensor doesn’t go off when the latch starts to fail from deformation.
According to the description, it’s just the sensor, not the latch. The microswitch has a lever like many do and that lever can become bent if damaged which would prevent it from warning the user if they failed to latch the hood. Most older cars just had a secondary latch so if you failed to latch it completely, at least the secondary one would catch it…
Although the problem is with the hood latch, as with many Tesla safety recalls, the problem can be fixed with an over-the-air software patch.
Not sure what description you’re talking about, but I’m basing this on the article itself.
Even in your reply…you say the problem is the actual latch being physically damaged.
Is this a real recall or an OTA update?
I hate Tesla, but a lot of news outlets are like
TESLA RECALLS BAJILLION CARS And what they really mean is they released an OTA update to fix some extremely rare race condition.
The issue is still bad, but I feel like the news outlets are sensationalizing to the point of dishonesty sometimes.
To be clear I’m not sure I understand the actual underlying issue here, so idk how deserved the headline is, but whenever I see them, I’m immediately skeptical
Although the problem is with the hood latch, as with many Tesla safety recalls, the problem can be fixed with an over-the-air software patch.
The problem is a sensor that detects if the latch is closed. How did an OTA fix this?
It hard to tell how big of a concern this was
Although the problem is with the hood latch, as with many Tesla safety recalls, the problem can be fixed with an over-the-air software patch
This is what happens when you run all the car’s mechanical and electronic switches though some cheap, sh*tty tablet interface. Instead of directly wiring them to lights on the dashboard.