Tesla Faces A Self-Driving Car Crisis Amid Reports Of Short-Circuiting Chips

Tesla's ongoing quality control woes continue with new reports that its semi-autonomous driving hardware on some brand new vehicles is failing, which in turn disables Autopilot, cameras, GPS, navigation, and related active safety systems. The issue has grown big enough that a recall may be in the making, although currently some company insiders are claiming that Tesla service departments were told to "play down" any safety concerns.

It seems like Tesla quality problems appear in the news quite often. The most recent issue centers around Tesla's HW4 self-driving chipset. Found mostly in new Teslas made in the last few months, HW4s have been reportedly to short-circuiting, resulting in complete failure of the system. What's embarrassing about this is that Elon Musk had previously bragged about how HW4 (a.k.a. AI4) would be the answer to full autonomous driving and that it was three to eight times more powerful than HW3, depending on the workload. 


While the true nature of the failures is yet to be revealed, some sources believe that the system's internal battery was somehow shorting out during the camera calibration process. The reason why this is such a big deal is because upon failure, multiple systems are rendered useless as well, including the camera suite, GPS navigation, and, of course, Autopilot/self-driving modes. It's a huge safety concern that needs to be addressed quickly as the failure can happen randomly. In fact, some customer cars have failed in as little as a few dozen miles of driving.

Potentially compounding the problem, it seems like Tesla is dragging its feet to help customers and possibly even downplaying the failures altogether. Anonymous insiders -- which may or may not be reliable -- say that the company has received a significant number of complaints regarding HW4, but has yet to officially release a service bulletin. Another source further claims that Tesla instructed its service teams to "play down any safety concerns related to this problem to avoid people believing their brand-new cars are not drivable."

That being said, according to this report, the automaker has informed the NHTSA on the matter, though not necessarily about the HW4 itself. Federal safety regulations mandate that manufacturers need to report malfunctioning rearview cameras, which are indeed party of this situation.

Photo credits: Tesla