On Wednesday, Tesla announced the recall of several Tesla models across the United States due to the Autopilot feature crashes. Around 2 million Teslas have been recalled to prevent these crashes.

The utilization of the autopilot feature helps control the wheel, gas, and break. Even with this applied, the car still needs to have assistance from a driver to properly function. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has recorded around 1,000 crashes due to the applied Autopilot feature. NHTSA additionally stated the crashes happened due to malfunctions within the monitoring system of the Autopilot. The monitoring system helps to detect if the driver is paying attention or not.

“Tesla should not be selling cars if they have defects. The customer’s safety should be the number one priority,” sophomore Serenity Savage expressed.

Tesla has publicly voiced their stance towards the Autopilot situation on X, formally known as Twitter.

“We at Tesla believe that we have a moral obligation to continue improving our already best in class safety systems,” the company stated on Monday, two days before the official announcement of the recall. “At the same time, we also believe it is morally indefensible not to make these systems available to a wider set of consumers, given the incontrovertible data that shows it is saving lives and preventing injury,” continues Tesla’s post.

A day after the company stated this, they agreed with NHTSA to launch a software update to the Autosteer feature to assure limitations until people are shown to have control over their car on Autopilot.
“I think the autopilot feature on Teslas has both good and bad aspects. Although they help people go places without the use of gps or even the person having to physically drive, Teslas cause many crashes. I believe they are relatively safe but are not as reliable as someone physically driving a car,” sophomore Yasmin Teixeira stated.

Though there has been much debate on this topic, Tesla’s safety concerns revolving around the Autopilot feature has been facing major backlash. While the company has stated the feature is safe, crashes had been a tragic result due to the lack of awareness of the drivers. Implementing the recall and software update can contribute back to Tesla’s original safety systems to no longer have malfunctions with the Autopilot feature.