The U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) said on Thursday it is investigating Tesla after identifying delays in the company’s submission of crash reports involving advanced driver-assistance and self-driving vehicles.
The agency requires automakers to submit such reports within one to five days of being notified of a crash. NHTSA said it had found “numerous incident crash reports from Tesla that arrived several months or more after those incidents.”
In a statement, the regulator said it had launched an audit query “to evaluate the cause of the potential delays in reporting, the scope of any such delays, and the mitigations that Tesla has developed to address them.”
NHTSA added that “when the reports were submitted, Tesla submitted them in one of two ways. Many of the reports were submitted as part of a single batch, while others were submitted on a rolling basis.” The company told the agency that the delays were linked to “an issue with Tesla’s data collection, which, according to Tesla, has now been fixed,” NHTSA said.
The regulator is also reviewing whether any earlier reports remain outstanding and if the submitted reports included all required information. Tesla did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
NHTSA has multiple ongoing probes into Tesla, including one launched in October into collisions involving the company’s Full Self-Driving system in low-visibility conditions, covering about 2.4 million vehicles after four reported crashes, one of them fatal. It separately opened an inquiry in January into 2.6 million vehicles over incidents linked to a remote vehicle movement feature, and is reviewing Tesla’s self-driving robotaxi service launched in Austin in June.