More than 376,000 Tesla Model Y, Model 3s have faulty steering

The system won't fail while the car is in motion.

Some Tesla owners have yet another thing to worry about. As sales crash in Europe and protests gather outside Tesla showrooms in the US as a result of the CEO's political engagement, it now emerges that more than 376,000 Model Y crossovers and Model 3 sedans are at risk for power steering failure. So far, it has resulted in more than 3,000 warranty claims and caused 570 crashes, according to Tesla and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

Federal investigators have known about the problem for some time—in 2023 NHTSA's Office of Defects Investigation opened a preliminary inquiry after 12 reports of steering failures, including three Model 3s and nine Model Ys.

By February 2024, NHTSA had received 124 complaints about steering failure in 2023 Teslas and found another 2,264 reports of steering problems. Color me wrong, though—at the time, I wrote that "a software patch is unlikely to help," except a software patch is indeed the remedy here.

The problem is caused by excess voltage reaching the printed circuit board that controls the electronic power steering. That can overstress the components, which causes the power steering to fail next time the car slows to a complete stop. Unlike a recent steering recall affecting Mazda's CX-90 SUV, in this particular case the failure is unlikely to rob a driver of power steering while moving. The system is designed such that if the overvoltage occurs while the car is in motion, the power steering remains active until the car next stops.

A lack of power-assisted steering isn't the worst thing in the world—many readers will be old enough to remember when the feature was far from ubiquitous and parallel parking meant a bicep workout. But it's also not supposed to happen on such a safety-critical system.

According to the NHTSA Part 573 Safety Recall Report, NHTSA and Tesla discussed the problem for several months, with NHTSA's main concern that the failure (at a stop) could happen "at an unsafe location" and that the increased steering effort could surprise the driver and therefore a formal recall ought to be performed. Tesla agreed with that in mid-January.

This is now Tesla's second recall of 2025. At the beginning of the year, it issued a recall for more than 283,000 Models 3, Y, S, and X, which were built with potentially faulty backup camera systems. Since a backup camera system is a legal requirement under the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards, such failures are taken seriously—in October 2024, a different issue saw the recall of more than 27,000 Cybertrucks to fix their cameras.

The first step in Tesla's remedy for this latest camera problem is another software update—the problematic builds could, in cold weather, short out some power components in the camera system. Tesla said it was also working to identify which cars had not been fixed in time—these will require the physical replacement of the car computer with a new unit.

Software recalls are only getting more common

As Ars noted last year, the nature of automotive safety recalls is changing. As ever more subsystems on modern cars are computer-controlled, automakers are using those computers to solve hardware problems, although not always in a manner that the owners entirely appreciate. The advent of software-defined vehicles will only accelerate this trend. In part, that's because they're designed to be easily updated over the air, but it's also because the automotive industry has fallen into the same "minimal viable product" trap as the tech sector, with cars being pushed out the door before everything is fully baked. As trends go, we don't like it.

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post.

Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every day for many years.

News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025 (till end of January): 487

RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend