Feds Launch Safety Probe Into 2.6 Million Tesla’s Remote Summon Feature

In 2016, Elon Musk promised that Tesla owners would be able to “summon” their vehicle from anywhere, including having a car in New York come to its driver in Los Angeles. In 2025, Tesla’s summon technology is under investigation because it keeps crashing into posts and parked cars. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration announced Tuesday that it will launch a probe into 2.6 million Tesla vehicles over safety concerns related to the “Actually Smart Summon” feature.

The preliminary evaluation of Tesla’s remote driving feature follows multiple reports of accidents involving Smart Summon and Actually Smart Summon. According to the NHTSA’s Office of Defects Investigation (ODI), the probe will look at the top speed that a vehicle can travel while being remotely controlled, connectivity delays that occur when a vehicle is summoned, and whether Tesla’s autonomous driving software can sufficiently navigate the environments it is being used in.

A brief history of Summon, which has had a checkered history for Tesla: A version of the feature has been available in Tesla vehicles equipped with the company’s dubiously named “Full Self-Driving Capability” (FSD) since 2016. In theory, the technology is designed to allow a driver to call for their vehicle to come to them, allowing it to autonomously navigate without a person inside the vehicle. Initially, it only worked to recall a car from a driveway or parking lot.

It eventually got upgraded to Smart Summon in 2019, which enabled the vehicle to navigate more complex situations and recall a car from up to 200 feet. After missing many (many) self-imposed deadlines from Musk, Tesla finally introduced its Actually Smart Summon (abbreviated to sigh ASS) late last year. In order to use ASS, car owners must press and hold down a button in the Tesla app while the car is operating autonomously—an effort to make the owner monitor the car to make sure it doesn’t crash. The feature has been panned as slow and inefficient.

Now it’s being investigated for causing accidents. According to the NHTSA, there is only one official report of an accident involving a version of the Summon software, but there have been at least three media reports of similar accidents and 12 reports of crashes related to the software that have come in up Vehicle Owners Questionnaires. Of the 16 total reports on the NHTSA’s radar, Tesla has shared exactly zero of them with the agency despite requirements for crashes involving Automated Driving Systems to be reported.

Musk probably isn’t sweating that too much—part of his whole effort of befriending President-elect Donald Trump has been to lobby for the rollback of accident report requirements for autonomous vehicles. It seems likely he’ll get his wish, and there’s a non-zero chance this investigation gets closed before it even really gets started.

Even if this probe gets shut down by the incoming administration, it hasn’t exactly been a banner couple of years for Tesla’s autonomous tech. The NHTSA opened an investigation into the company’s Full Self-Driving system last year following a series of high-profile crashes that allegedly involved the technology. The company recalled its Autopilot technology on more than two million cars back in 2023, and the NHTSA is still looking into whether its fixes were actually sufficient to address risks associated with the software. The Department of Justice, meanwhile, is still in the process of determining whether Tesla misled consumers and investors with how it has advertised its self-driving features.