Oh, Tesla. The Austin, Texas-based EV automaker is recalling nearly 700,000 vehicles in the U.S. because of an issue with the warning light on the tire pressure monitoring system. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration says the recall impacts certain 2024 Cybertrucks, 2017-2025 Model 3s and 2020-2025 Model Ys. Before everyone freaks out and says “It doesn’t count because it’s going to be fixed with an over-the-air update,” I’d just like to say: yes, it does because NHTSA says so.
Basically, the issue is that the TPMS warning light on these cars might not stay illuminated between drive cycles. That means it could fail to warn the driver that their car has low tire pressure. That, as you may have guessed, can be dangerous and lead to a crash. Now, 694,304 Teslas are being recalled. Unless you’ve got a Model S or Model X, your car was hit with this issue.
To Tesla’s credit, it did seem to act rather fast after the issue was discovered. It first popped up on November 6, and by December 2 the root cause analysis was done. By December 9, Tesla had reviewed all of its fleet data to figure out what vehicles were impacted. On December 13, Tesla found 76 warranty claims and a single field report related to the issue. Luckily, there weren’t any reports of collision, injuries or fatalities, according to NHTSA.
In fact, this whole thing happened so quickly that the OTA update has already been rolled out. Impacted customers don’t really need to do anything else, but regardless, they’ll be notified by February 15, 2025. Would it have been better if this recall never had to happen? Sure, but at least Tesla did something right and fixed it quickly.
For those keeping score at home, this is the seventh Tesla Cybertruck recall of the year. It’s already been hit with recalls for faulty inverters, bad rearview cameras, pedals that get stuck, failing floppy windshield wipers, bed trip that could go flying off and an issue with the font size of certain warning lights.
