Getty Images / Jonathan Gitlin
In November, we learned that the National Road Safety Administration had begun an engineering analysis of a possible defect with Tesla’s popular Models S and X battery electric vehicles. On Wednesday, the other shoe fell off when NHTSA notified the U.S. automaker that it had to recall 158,000 vehicles to repair defective touchscreens.
The problem has to do with a component in the vehicles’ information systems, called the Media Control Unit. An 8 GB eMMC NAND memory chip is buried in the MCU, which can be written only a limited number of times. Once this number of read / write cycles is reached – something that lasts between three and four years, depending on how much the car is driven – the touch screen dies. And unfortunately, this is a real problem in a car where the touch screen is like accessing almost all the control panels.
The fact that you can not browse the internet in your car or stream a podcast is, of course, an inconvenience, especially in a luxury vehicle. However, NHTSA is more concerned about the fact that if the touch screen dies, features such as the backup camera and the unmasking of the window are also lost, as well as audible warnings for other safety systems on board.
The problem is well known among the Tesla community, which applies to any Model S built between 2012 and 2018, and Model Xs built between 2016 and 2018. After NHTSA received 537 complaints from owners, he asked Tesla if he had more information on the extent of the problem. It did – providing records of thousands of complaints and more than 12,000 MCU replacements.
Now, according to Reuters, NHTSA has taken the unusual step of telling Tesla to recall the 158,000 vehicles affected. “[D]”During our review of the data, Tesla gave the confirmation that all units will inevitably fail given the finite storage capacity of the memory device,” NHTSA told Reuters. NHTSA also noted that Tesla was trying to solve the problem with software packages, but this is procedurally and materially inadequate “and the law requires car manufacturers to recall vehicles that contain safety defects.
Tesla has no press office to comment, and the company has not made a statement about its Twitter feed or that of Elon Musk. The company has since redesigned the MCU to use a 64 GB eMMC, so recent vehicles should not be affected. The more popular models 3 and Y are not affected by this edition.