NHTSA closes Tesla remote parking investigation
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has closed its investigation of crashes involving Tesla’s “Actually Smart Summon” remote parking feature.
The Office of Defects Investigations (ODI) opened a preliminary evaluation in January 2025 of the short-distance SAE Level 2 system.
ODI analyzed complaint data from Tesla and consumers, which shows that almost all Summon-reported crashes involved minor property damage claims and no reported incidents involving a vulnerable road user, injury, fatality, or major property damage.
Out of millions of Summon sessions, a fraction of 1% resulted in an incident, according to NHTSA. ODI found 159 incidents occurred, with 97 involving crashes and/or fires, out of a population of nearly 2.6 million 2016-2025 model year Model S and X Teslas, 2017-2025 Model 3s, and 2020-2025 Model Ys equipped with Full Self-Driving (FSD).
“Almost all those incidents took place where, typically early in a Summon session, the system or person using the app failed to fully detect or respond appropriately to vehicle surroundings, resulting in minor impacts,” an April 3 NHTSA investigation document states. “Incidents took place when app users did not have a complete 360-degree view of the surroundings in the app to assess situational awareness. This limited the app user’s ability to determine whether an impact was imminent during initial vehicle maneuvers, such as reversing in close proximity to an obstacle or a curb.”
ODI found that the impacts most often occurred with parking gates, adjacent parked vehicles, and short parking bollards.
Two Summon crashes were related to camera blockages. In both crashes, Summon attempted to navigate a snowy parking lot with snow partially or fully obstructing the forward-facing cameras.
On Jan. 15, 2025, NHTSA says Tesla released two over-the-air (OTA) software updates to improve camera blockage detection mechanisms.
Later that month, Tesla identified additional system requirements associated with camera visibility checks and released two more OTA software updates to reduce false negative camera blockage detections due to snow or condensation. And in February 2025, Tesla released another OTA software update to improve vehicle reaction to dynamic gates.
By late November, another OTA software update improved vehicle performance by adding object detections from a separate neural network, according to NHTSA.
NHTSA closed its investigation on April 3 due to low incident occurrence and low incident severity.
Reuters reports that last month, NHTSA upgraded a separate investigation into Tesla’s FSD system to an “engineering analysis,” a more advanced stage that typically precedes a potential recall, and expanded the review to about 3.2 million vehicles.
In October, NHTSA opened an investigation into 2.9 million FSD-equipped vehicles following reports of traffic-safety violations and a series of crashes.
ODI said at the time that the investigation would focus on whether certain driving inputs, within the control authority of FSD, prevent the driver from supervising the vehicle when they are unexpectedly performed.
Images
Featured image credit: jetcityimage/iStock