Tesla recalls over 10,000 vehicles with a faulty emergency braking system

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It’s been a rough couple of weeks for Tesla. After a recall of around 3,000 Model 3 and Model Y vehicles for faulty suspensions, the company has issued yet another recall. This time around, the issue affects nearly 12,000 of the company’s vehicles and involves a software update gone wrong.

The latest Tesla recall came to light late last week via the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). It includes a total of 11,704 vehicles across all four of the company’s models.

This particular recall has come due to the recent 10.3 update to the Full-Self Driving (Beta) program on Tesla vehicles. The company says that this software update caused a “communication disconnect between two onboard chips,” which causes false forward-collision warnings and even causes improper activation of the automatic emergency brake system on the vehicles.

And this isn’t the first time that Tesla has had issues with a software update. The company became the target of the NHTSA earlier last month after a series of crashes involving Teslas and emergency vehicles.

In that instance, the NHTSA wondered why Tesla didn’t issue a recall, and this current fault with the 10.3 update seems to be an example of Tesla going through the appropriate process.

As for this current issue, the company is confident that it has been resolved. On October 29, the company released another over-the-air firmware update for the recalled vehicles that fixed the communication error that came as part of the previous update.

The NHTSA tells Gizmodo, “Tesla uninstalled FSD 10.3 after receiving reports of inadvertent activation of the automatic emergency braking system. Tesla informed NHTSA that it has updated the software and released FSD version 10.3.1 to those vehicles affected.”

The company says that 99.8 percent of its vehicles have installed the fix and that no further action is necessary from them. That other 0.2 percent equals 17 total vehicles that have yet to receive the update.

Hopefully, those last 17 Tesla vehicles get the update soon, because the last thing we need on the highway is a fleet of “self-driving” vehicles that automatically slam on the brakes from time to time.

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