Tesla gets 5-week extension in US probe of Full Self-Driving traffic violations

Jan 16 (Reuters) – U.S. auto safety regulators, Tesla’s It’s a five-week extension to respond to an investigation into whether the Elon Musk-led company’s vehicles violated traffic laws while its Full Self-Driving system was in effect.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said Friday it was extending the deadline for substantive responses to Feb. 23 after Tesla requested more time to manually review thousands of records to identify potentially relevant incidents.

The investigation is part of a federal review of Tesla’s driver-assistance technology as regulators look into allegations that vehicles using FSD commit traffic violations.

NHTSA launched a preliminary assessment in October and sent Tesla a sweeping “request for information” in December seeking data on consumer complaints, field reports, accidents, lawsuits and internal evaluations of alleged FSD-related violations.

The agency received 62 complaints and identified additional media and accident reports potentially related to the matter.

In the Jan. 12 request, Tesla said it had 8,313 records left to review and could process about 300 records per day.

Tesla also said the volume of requests could affect the quality of responses, noting the burden of responding to multiple NHTSA investigations simultaneously, including delayed crash reporting and separate investigations for inoperative door handles.

(‌Reporting by Akash Sriram in Bengaluru; Editing by Shinjini Ganguli)