Tesla Smart Summon investigation closed by NHTSA

Smart Summon.

In January of 2025, National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s (NHTSA’s) Office of Defects Investigations (ODI) opened Preliminary Evaluation 24003 (PE24033) to investigate Actually Smart Summon (Summon) sessions resulting in low speed crashes during active sessions.

Tesla Smart Summon is a short-distance SAE Level 2 system, controlled by the user from a smart phone within a certain distance and intended for use in parking lots and on private property.

However, as of April 2026, due to low incident occurrence and low incident severity, “this preliminary evaluation is closed.”

ODI analyzed complaint data provided by Tesla as well as complaints submitted from consumers to identify Summon incidents resulting in crashes. Analysis indicated that almost all Summon reported crashes involved minor property damage claims with no reported incidents involving a vulnerable road user, injury, fatality, or major property damage as indicated by an air bag deployment or vehicle tow away.

ODI found that only about 1% of the millions of Summon sessions resulted in an incident. Laying part of the blame at the feet of the user, ODI noted that almost all those incidents took place where, typically early in a Summon session, the system or person using the app failed to fully detect or respond appropriately to vehicle surroundings.

Incidents took place when app users did not have a complete 360-degree view of the surroundings in the app to assess situational awareness. This limited the app user’s ability to determine whether an impact was imminent during initial vehicle maneuvers such as reversing in close proximity to an obstacle or a curb.

ODI found that the impacts most often occurred with parking gates, adjacently parked vehicles, and short parking bollards.

During this investigation, ODI identified two Summon crashes where the app attempted to navigate a snowy parking lot with snow partially or fully obstructing the forward-facing cameras, which went undetected.

Over the 15 months since the investigation began, Tesla released Over-the-Air (OTA) Software Updates aimed at improving Smart Summons.

On January 15, 2025, the company released OTA Software Update Action numbers 578998 and 579185 for vehicles in service to implement a camera blockage detection condition. Both OTAs improve camera blockage detection mechanisms.

On January 20, 2025, and January 30, 2025, Tesla identified additional system requirements associated with camera visibility checks and released OTA SW-578752 and SW-580322, respectively. These firmware updates reduce false negative camera blockage detections due to snow or condensation.

On February 6, 2025, Tesla deployed OTA SW-578839 to improve vehicle reaction to dynamic gates. This OTA update upgraded vehicle perception systems through a high-fidelity occupancy determination network, which uses data from vehicle sensory systems to improve reconstruction of field objects with high accuracy.

And finally on November 20, 2025, Tesla further improved vehicle performance by adding object detections from a separate neural network through OTA SW-580514. Owners of the affected vehicles received all six OTA SW updates. Tesla also released these SW updates to production vehicles. See online public file for detailed descriptions of all six OTA SW updates.

NHTSA added that the “closing of this investigation does not constitute a finding that a safety-related defect does not exist. The agency reserves the right to take additional action if warranted by future circumstances.”

The Agency retains the right to double back!

More information is available at this link on the NHTSA Action Number: PE24033. Look back to January 2025 to find it.

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