After opening strong in pre-market trading, Tesla’s stock (TSLA) fell this morning as more attention is dropped at its serious phantom braking issue on Autopilot.
Back in November, Electrek released a report called ‘Tesla has a serious phantom braking problem in Autopilot.‘
It highlighted a big increase in Tesla owners reporting dangerous phantom braking events on Autopilot.
Phantom braking is a term used to explain when a complicated driver assistance system (ADAS) or a self-driving system applies the brakes for no good reason.
The system will be falsely detecting an object on the road or anticipating a collision that won’t actually occur and apply the brake to attempt to avoid it.
Obviously, phantom braking is something you need to avoid since it will possibly create accidents if someone is following too closely behind you.
This issue isn’t latest in Tesla’s Autopilot, but our report focused on Tesla drivers noticing an obvious increase in instances, which also showed in complaints to the NHTSA.
Our report made the rounds in a number of other outlets, however it didn’t really go mainstream until now.
The Washington Post just posted a really similar report specializing in the NHTSA complaints, which they compiled on this chart:
Tesla’s stock (TSLA) dropped by greater than 3% following the report this morning, after it was up greater than 1% in pre-market trading.
Within the report, NHTSA spokeswoman Lucia Sanchez said that they’re talking with Tesla in regards to the complaints:
“NHTSA is aware of complaints received about forward collision avoidance and is reviewing them through our risk-based evaluation process. This process includes discussions with the manufacturer, in addition to reviewing additional data sources, including Early Warning Reporting data. If the information show that a risk may exist, NHTSA will act immediately.”
Tesla has not commented on the problem. Elon Musk did admit that one in every of the Full Self-Driving Beta updates had an actual issue with phantom braking, but this particular problem is with the Autopilot suite of features and never the FSD Beta.
Many homeowners are still reporting having the identical problematic phantom braking rate, but at the very least the grievance rate with NHTSA has reduced during the last two months.