Remember when Elon Musk said Full Self-Driving would be ready "next year" back in 2016? Eight years and countless deadline misses later, federal regulators are finally stepping in. NHTSA's investigation into Tesla's FSD system is reportedly on the verge of triggering a recall.
This is what happens when you ship a beta product to public roads and call it "Full Self-Driving."
The probe focuses on incidents where FSD failed to respond appropriately to road conditions, leading to crashes. According to The Verge, NHTSA has documented multiple cases where the system misidentified obstacles, failed to detect stopped vehicles, or made dangerous lane changes.
None of this is surprising to anyone who's followed Tesla's FSD promises. The company has been selling "Full Self-Driving capability" since 2016, with Musk repeatedly claiming autonomous driving was months away. In 2019, he promised one million robotaxis by 2020. In 2021, he said FSD would be "feature complete" by year's end. The goalposts keep moving.
The technology is impressive—but it's not what they promised. Tesla's vision-only approach, abandoning lidar and radar, is genuinely innovative. The neural networks are sophisticated. The over-the-air updates push the boundaries of automotive software. But calling it "Full Self-Driving" when it requires constant attention is, at best, misleading. At worst, it's dangerous.
Drivers trust brand names. When something is called "Full Self-Driving," people assume it drives itself. They check their phones. They look away. And then someone dies.
A recall would likely require Tesla to rename the system, update the interface, and possibly downgrade some capabilities. That's embarrassing for a company that built its valuation on autonomy promises. But it's necessary.
The frustrating part is that Tesla built genuinely impressive technology. is one of the better advanced driver assistance systems available. But by overpromising, overselling, and treating public roads as a testing ground, Tesla undermined trust in the entire autonomous vehicle industry.
