Tesla has suspended the rollout of its FSD Beta driver assistance software, for which customers have paid US$15,000, in the United States and Canada, the time to fix the malfunctions recently uncovered by a regulator, a we learned on Monday.
According to an advisory issued in mid-February, the US Highway Traffic Safety Agency (NHTSA) said software flaws could cause vehicles to act in potentially dangerous ways at intersections.
Tesla will therefore have to update the software on 362,758 cars that are equipped or planned to receive it.
And “until the software version containing the changes is available, we have halted the rollout of FSD Beta to all those who subscribed to it, but will not [l’ont] not yet received,” Tesla said in a note posted on its website at an undetermined date but spotted by US media on Monday.
Since the end of 2020, the manufacturer has been gradually rolling out this test version of FSD (Full Self Driving), called FSD Beta. In January, Tesla estimated that by the end of 2022 it had been distributed to almost all customers who had purchased FSD in the United States and Canada, or about 400,000.
The driver assistance systems offered by Tesla are in the sights of the American authorities, who have initiated various investigations into their capabilities as such or the words used by the company to praise their merits.
Officially, Tesla claims that these systems “are designed for use by an alert driver whose hands are on the wheel and who is ready to regain control of their vehicle at a moment’s notice.”
But his boss, Elon Musk, regularly goes much further, claiming in particular for several years that fully autonomous driving on Teslas is a matter of a few months.