U.S. launches Tesla probe following more crashes involving full self-driving feature

U.S. federal auto safety regulators have opened yet another investigation into Tesla's full self-driving technology after dozens of incidents in which its vehicles ran red lights or drove on the wrong side of the road, sometimes crashing into other vehicles and injuring people.

The U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said in a filing dated Tuesday that it has 58 incident reports of Tesla vehicles violating traffic safety laws while operating in full self-driving mode. In reports to regulators, many of the Tesla drivers said the cars gave them no warning about the unexpected behavior.

The probe covers 2,882,566 vehicles, essentially all Teslas equipped with full self-driving technology, or FSD, of which there are two types.

Level 2 driver-assistance software, or "Full Self-Driving (Supervised)," requires drivers to pay full attention to the road. The company is still testing a different version that does not require driver intervention, something that the automaker's owner and CEO Elon Musk has been promising to roll out for years.

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The new investigation follows a host of other probes into the FSD feature on Teslas, which has been blamed for several injuries and deaths. Tesla has repeatedly said the system cannot drive itself and human drivers must be ready to intervene at all times.

Tesla is also under investigation by the NHTSA for a "summon" technology that allows drivers to tell their cars to drive to their location and pick them up, a feature that has reportedly led to some fender benders in parking lots.

A probe into driver-assistance features in 2.4 million Teslas was opened last year after several crashes in fog and other low-visibility conditions, including one in which a pedestrian was killed.

Another investigation was launched by the NHTSA in August looking into why Tesla apparently has not been reporting crashes promptly to the agency as required by its rules.

Musk is under pressure to show that the latest advances in its driver-assistance features have not only fixed such glitches but have also made them so good drivers don't even need to look out the window anymore.

He also recently promised to put hundreds of thousands of such self-driving Tesla cars and Tesla robotaxis on roads by the end of the next year.

Tesla shares fell 1.4 per cent Thursday.