Tesla touchscreen issue: NHTSA requests recall of Model S and X

In November, we learned that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration had opened a technical analysis on a potential defect in Tesla’s Model S and X battery electric vehicles. The other shoe went down on Wednesday when NHTSA informed the US automaker it had to recall 158,000 vehicles to repair faulty touchscreens.

The issue is with a component of vehicle infotainment systems called the Media Control Unit. An 8GB eMMC NAND flash memory chip is buried in the MCU, which can only be written in a finite number of times. Once that number of read / write cycles is reached – which takes between three and four years depending on the speed of the car – the touchscreen dies. And unfortunately, this is a real problem in a car where the touchscreen is the way to access almost all the controls.

Not being able to browse the Internet in your car or broadcast a podcast is obviously a downside, especially in a high-end vehicle. But NHTSA is more concerned that if the touchscreen dies, functions like the rear view camera and window defogger are also lost, as are the audible alerts for other onboard security systems.

The issue is well known to the Tesla community, affecting all Model Ss built between 2012 and 2018, and Model Xs built between 2016 and 2018. After NHTSA received 537 complaints from owners, it asked Tesla if it had more information on the scope of the problem. That’s what he did: he turned over tapes of thousands of complaints and over 12,000 MCU replacements.

Now NHTSA has taken the unusual steps of telling Tesla it must recall the 158,000 affected vehicles, according to Reuters. “[D]During our review of the data, Tesla confirmed that all units would inevitably fail given the limited storage capacity of the memory device, ”NHTSA told Reuters. The NHTSA also noted that Tesla had attempted to fix the problem with software fixes, but these were and substantially insufficient “and the law requires automakers to recall vehicles with safety defects.

Tesla does not have a press office to contact for comment, and the company has not made a statement on either its Twitter feed or that of CEO Elon Musk. The company has since redesigned the MCU to use a 64GB eMMC, so newer vehicles shouldn’t be affected. The most popular 3 and Y models are not affected by this problem.