NHTSA gave Tesla until August 12 to document its FSD visibility-degradation fix
The agency's information request, issued July 2, gave Tesla until Wednesday to hand over the design, testing and deployment history of the system meant to detect when Full Self-Driving's cameras are impaired.
The Office of Defects Investigation at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration set August 12 as the deadline for Tesla to answer an information request covering the camera-degradation detection system in Full Self-Driving.
The letter, issued July 2, followed the agency’s decision in March to upgrade a preliminary evaluation to an engineering analysis, EA26002. The investigation covers an estimated 3,203,754 vehicles — 2016-2026 Model S and Model X, 2017-2026 Model 3, 2020-2026 Model Y and 2023-2026 Cybertruck equipped with FSD — and records nine crashes, two injury incidents and one fatality.
ODI described the alleged defect as the failure of the degradation detection system, on encountering reduced roadway visibility, to detect a degraded state and warn the driver appropriately. In the crashes it reviewed, the agency said the system did not detect common conditions that impaired camera visibility, or did not alert the driver until immediately before the crash. In each of those crashes, it said, FSD also lost track of or never detected a lead vehicle in its path.
The investigation resume records that Tesla began developing an update to the detection system on June 28, 2024, the day after it submitted its report on a fatal crash of November 28, 2023. ODI wrote that it does not have information on when that update was deployed or which vehicles carry it, and that Tesla’s own post-incident analysis indicated the update might have affected three of the nine incidents had it been installed at the time.
The request asks for FSD version numbers, deployment dates and applicable vehicle configurations. It also requires document metadata — creation dates, authors, modification history, file paths and project version tags — to be preserved and submitted with the response.
On August 6, ODI granted Tesla a partial extension to September 23 for eight of the request’s questions. That memo is covered in NHTSA gave Tesla six more weeks on eight of its FSD information requests.
Source: NHTSA Office of Defects Investigation, information request EA26002-01, July 2, 2026. The investigation is set out in the ODI resume for EA26002, opened March 18, 2026.
Source: NHTSA Office of Defects Investigation, information request EA26002-01