Tesla recently requested and was granted a second deadline extension from federal safety regulators to hand over crash data tied to its Full Self-Driving software.
What's happening?
According to Electrek, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration opened an investigation into Tesla's Full Self-Driving software last October after linking the technology to 58 incidents in which vehicles ran red lights or crossed into oncoming traffic. The probe covers roughly 2.88 million Tesla vehicles.
By December, that number had climbed nearly 60% to 80 documented violations. The NHTSA sent Tesla a data request with a Jan. 19 deadline.
Tesla was granted an extension to Feb. 23 that was supposed to be a "final accommodation," but Tesla then requested and received the second extension to March 9 for crash-related video and data files. This was even after their own Robotaxi data confirmed a crash rate three times worse than human drivers.
Meanwhile, Tesla launched an "unsupervised" Robotaxi service in Austin in January using the same or similar FSD software under federal scrutiny (though the taxis in this program were still monitored from outside the vehicles).
The Austin fleet has been involved in at least 14 incidents since its June 2025 launch, according to NHTSA data cited by Electrek.
Why is this concerning for drivers?
The pattern raises real questions about the reliability of technology that Tesla has marketed as a path to fully autonomous driving, with plenty of broken commitments along the way. A viral video recently showed the software apparently attempting to drive into a lake, and many owners have had difficulty with it at railroad crossings.
"They seem to make a habit out of making these really big claims and then falling short," said one Tesla owner, who told NBC News he experienced unexpected lurching at railroad crossings. "It seems like borderline false advertising."
As Electrek detailed, Waymo, the competing Google-powered service completing 450,000 weekly driverless rides across six cities, filed a voluntary recall within weeks of its vehicles being caught passing school buses. Tesla, on its second NHTSA extension, still hasn't provided regulators with full data about its reported safety violations.
Tesla claimed that the volume they face responding to multiple NHTSA probes and separate investigations into delayed crash reporting and door handle issues, is "unduly burdensome and affects the quality of responses," according to the Los Angeles Times.
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