U.S. Authorities to Investigate Tesla Vehicles Over Sudden Acceleration Complaints

On Friday, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) said it will review a petition to examine 500,000 Tesla vehicles over a number of complaints about sudden vehicle acceleration.

The federal agency said it will look at the petition after having received 127 reports involving 123 unique Tesla vehicles. Out of 127 reports, 110 involve 52 injuries due to the sudden acceleration issue.

According to reports, a large number of Tesla vehicles sped up when drivers were parking their cars, or when using their vehicle’s driver assistance system in traffic.

Another driver in Avondale said he was parking his vehicle at an elementary school when it sped up on its own and “went over a curb and into a chain-link fence".

A few months ago, the NHTSA said it was looking into whether the carmaker should have recalled 2,000 of its electric vehicles in May instead of rolling out a new software version to fix a flaw which could have caused battery fires in Model S and Model X, which were produced between 2012 and 2019.

The agency said last week that it was investigating the Dec. 29 accident with the Tesla Model 3 that resulted in passenger’s death after the vehicle smashed into a parked fire truck in Indiana.

The National Transportation Safety Board will have a meeting on February 25 to look into the potential cause of the 2018 fatal crash of a Tesla Model X where the driver was using Autopilot at the time of the accident.