NHTSA closes Tesla Smart Summon probe after 159 incidents

NHTSA has closed its investigation into Tesla’s “Actually Smart Summon” feature after documenting 159 incidents, all involving minor property damage.

The agency found zero injuries and zero fatalities linked to the feature, and determined that Tesla’s six over-the-air software updates adequately addressed the issues. No recall was issued.

159 incidents out of ‘millions of sessions’

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s Office of Defects Investigation (ODI) opened the probe in January 2025 after reports of crashes during Actually Smart Summon sessions. The investigation, designated PE24033, covered 2016-2025 Model S and X, 2017-2025 Model 3, and 2020-2025 Model Y vehicles equipped with FSD — a population of approximately 2,585,000 vehicles.

According to the closing document dated April 3, 2026, ODI identified 159 total incidents, of which 97 involved crashes. The agency found that “almost all Summon reported crashes involved minor property damage claims with no reported incidents involving a vulnerable road user, injury, fatality, or major property damage as indicated by an air bag deployment or vehicle tow away.”

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NHTSA noted that out of “millions of Summon sessions, a fraction of 1% resulted in an incident.” The impacts most often occurred with parking gates, adjacently parked vehicles, and short parking bollards — the kind of low-speed, close-quarters obstacles that plague parking lot maneuvering.

The investigation identified specific failure modes. Camera blockages from snow caused at least two crashes where Summon attempted to navigate snowy parking lots with partially or fully obstructed forward-facing cameras. The system failed to detect the blockage and collided with parked vehicles. In another case, the vehicle failed to yield for a parking garage gate arm, resulting in an impact.

Tesla deployed 6 OTA updates during investigation

Rather than waiting for a recall order, Tesla released a series of over-the-air software updates throughout 2025 to address the identified issues. The timeline, per NHTSA’s closing document:

On January 15, 2025, Tesla pushed OTA updates 578998 and 579185 to improve camera blockage detection. Five days later, on January 20, and again on January 30, Tesla released additional updates (SW-578752 and SW-580322) to reduce false negative camera blockage detections caused by snow or condensation.

On February 6, 2025, Tesla deployed OTA SW-578839 specifically to improve the vehicle’s reaction to dynamic gates, upgrading the perception system with “a high-fidelity occupancy determination network” that reconstructs field objects with greater accuracy.

The sixth update, OTA SW-580514, arrived on November 20, 2025, adding object detections from a separate neural network to further improve performance. All six updates were pushed to affected vehicles and to new production vehicles.

Investigation closed — but NHTSA reserves the right to reopen

NHTSA closed the preliminary evaluation citing “low incident occurrence and low incident severity.” The agency was explicit, however, that “the closing of this investigation does not constitute a finding that a safety-related defect does not exist.” NHTSA reserves the right to take additional action if warranted by future circumstances.

This stands in sharp contrast to NHTSA’s posture on Tesla’s other autonomous driving features. The agency recently upgraded its investigation into FSD’s inability to handle reduced visibility conditions to an Engineering Analysis, the step that typically precedes a recall, covering 3.2 million vehicles. That probe involves nine crashes, one fatality, and one injury, and focuses on FSD’s failure to warn drivers when cameras are blinded by sun glare, fog, or other common road conditions.

It’s worth noting that when the Smart Summon investigation opened, we reported that Tesla had not reported any Smart Summon or Actually Smart Summon crashes through the Standing General Order for crashes involving automated driving systems — a federal reporting requirement.