Jan 16 (Reuters) – U.S. auto safety regulators have given Tesla a five-week extension to respond to an investigation into whether its vehicles violated traffic laws while the Elon Musk-led company’s Full Self-Driving system was enabled.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said on Friday it had extended a deadline for critical responses to February 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 examine claims that vehicles using FSD violate traffic laws.
NHTSA conducted an initial assessment in October and issued a comprehensive information request to Tesla in December, seeking data on consumer complaints, field reports, crashes, lawsuits and internal assessments related to FSD’s alleged violations.
The agency has received 62 complaints and identified additional media and incident reports that may be related to the issue.
In a Jan. 12 request, Tesla said it had 8,313 records pending review and could process about 300 records per day.
Tesla also cited the burden of responding to multiple NHTSA investigations simultaneously, including separate investigations into delayed crash reports and failed door handles, saying the number of requests could impact the quality of its response.
(Reporting by Akash Sriram in Bengaluru; Editing by Shinjini Ganguli)
