Another day, another recall for Tesla, but it's also another one of those recalls which don't really require the customers to do anything besides update their car's software.
According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), Tesla is recalling up to 199,575 Model S, Model X, and Model Y vehicles. In particular, these are 2023 models equipped with Tesla's Full Self Driving (FSD) 4.0 system, and running software versions 2023.44.30 through 2023.44.30.6 or 2023.44.100.
The culprit is a software instability that could prevent the rearview camera image from displaying, which can be quite an inconvenience. "If the condition is present, the rearview camera display will appear blank when the vehicle is shifted to Reverse," the NHTSA's Safety Recall Report says. "Unavailability of the rearview camera display upon starting a backing event may affect the driver’s rear visibility and increase the risk of a collision."
The NHTSA says, however, that Tesla has already released a free software update that fixes the issue. Affected customers will get a notification by mail starting March 22. Yes, that's two months from now. No, it doesn't make a lot of sense.
According to NHTSA's document, Tesla users started sending complaints about the issue in December 2023, and the company decided to do a recall on Jan. 12, 2023. Per the report, Tesla claims it is not aware of any crashes, injuries or deaths related to this particular bug.
Tesla recalls happen quite often; the last big one we remember was the company recalling more than 2 million cars in December over autopilot issues. Most of these, however, were due to software issues which Tesla was able to fix remotely, with an over-the-air software update.
