NHTSA closes Tesla Smart Summon probe after six OTA fixes

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has closed a lengthy investigation into Tesla’s Actually Smart Summon remote parking feature after documenting 159 incidents across an estimated population of around 2.6 million equipped vehicles. The agency found no injuries, no fatalities, and no cases of major property damage, determining that six over-the-air (OTA) updates deployed by the automaker during the investigation had adequately addressed the matter.

NHTSA declined to issue a recall as a result. The probe, opened in January 2025, found that incidents occurred in less than 1% of uses and typically involved low-speed contact with common parking hazards like gates, adjacent vehicles, or bollards. Notably, two crashes were attributed to snow obstructing forward-facing cameras without the system detecting the blockage. The development is just another indicator of the limitations of camera vision-only autonomy, a recurring problem and criticism levelled towards Tesla.

Another incident involved the system failing to yield for a parking garage gate arm. To address the issues as fully as possible, Tesla deployed targeted updates throughout 2025 addressing camera blockage detection, false-negative snow and condensation readings, and object recognition, with the final update in November 2025 adding detections from a separate neural network.

To be sure, NHTSA was careful to qualify the outcome. The closing document states explicitly that the decision does not constitute a finding that no safety defect exists, and the agency reserved the right to reopen the investigation if future circumstances warrant. While this is a relatively standard caveat, it carries particular weight given the wider regulatory environment Tesla is currently navigating.

On other fronts, Tesla continues to face deep regulatory scrutiny towards its self-driving technology. In March 2026, NHTSA upgraded its investigation into the Full Self Driving driver assist system’s performance in reduced-visibility conditions to an Engineering Analysis, the step that usually immediately precedes a direct recall. Reduced visibility encompasses situations involving heavy fog, sun glare, airborne dust and even nightfall—all conditions that camera vision-only systems inherently struggle to deal with. The probe covers some 3.2 million vehicles and was upgraded in the wake of nine documented crashes.

A separate investigation into FSD traffic law violations, covering around 2.88 million vehicles, is examining reports of the system running red lights, making illegal turns, and entering oncoming traffic lanes. Tesla’s upcoming Cybercab robotaxi, which eschews manual controls but keeps the camera-only approach, is due to enter series production in 2026 despite a lack of meaningful consumer demand, or an established regulatory framework for its deployment at scale.

The dogmatic camera-only architecture that Tesla has committed to—and which is uniform across its entire portfolio of self-driving technology products—means that scrutiny attributed to perceptual constraints will continue to follow it well beyond the closure of a single investigation.