In 2022, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) logged 758 complaints about Teslas suddenly decelerating for no reason on American highways (NHTSA ODI, 2022).
Drivers describe their vehicles “slamming the brakes” out of nowhere, with one shaken owner telling reporters, “It just slammed the brakes”.
These aren’t isolated glitches. U.S. District Judge Georgia Alexakis recently gave the green light to a class-action lawsuit, citing allegations that Tesla knowingly withheld warnings about this dangerous defect.
I borrowed a Model Y from a friend for a road trip and tried the Autopilot. That happened to me. So I pulled over, shut off Autopilot, and carried on with my trip. It was otherwise incident-free, partially because the friend had already had the car in the shop multiple times until most of the production defects were fixed. It still wasn’t waterproof, though.