Tesla has been granted a five-week extension by U.S. auto safety regulators to respond to an investigation into whether its vehicles violated traffic laws while the company’s Full Self-Driving (FSD) system was in use.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said on Friday it extended Tesla’s deadline for key responses until February 23, after the company asked for more time to manually review thousands of records. Tesla told regulators it needed the extension to identify incidents potentially relevant to the probe.
The investigation is part of broader federal scrutiny of Tesla’s advanced driver-assistance technology, as regulators examine claims that vehicles operating with FSD engaged may have committed traffic violations. NHTSA opened a preliminary evaluation in October and followed up in December with a wide-ranging information request seeking data on consumer complaints, field reports, crashes, lawsuits and internal analyses linked to alleged violations involving FSD.
According to NHTSA, the agency has received 62 consumer complaints and has identified additional media reports and crash data that could be related to the issue.
In a request dated January 12, Tesla said it still had 8,313 records to review and was processing about 300 records per day. The company also pointed to the strain of responding to multiple ongoing NHTSA investigations at the same time, including separate probes into delayed crash reporting and inoperative door handles. Tesla warned that the volume of regulatory requests could affect the quality and timeliness of its responses.
The outcome of the probe could have implications for how Tesla markets and deploys its FSD system, which despite its name still requires active driver supervision under current U.S. regulations.
