Auto safety regulators have begun investigating Tesla’s Model Y SUVs after a pair of owners reported their steering wheels were not properly secured to the steering column and could come off.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s Office of Defects Investigation (ODI) published a report (pdf) on Wednesday revealing the two Model Y SUVs were delivered to their owners without the retaining bolt that secures the steering wheel to the steering column. The ODI said the steering wheels were attached to the steering column with a friction fit, but that the friction fit eventually came loose while the vehicles were in use. The ODI said both recorded instances of steering wheel detachments occurred while the SUVs had low mileage.
The ODI is now investigating all Model Ys from the 2023 model year. The probe potentially impacts about 120,000 vehicles.
In one complaint filed with the NHTSA, an owner said he was driving with his family on Route 1 in Woodbridge, New Jersey, when the steering wheel suddenly came off on Jan. 29, five days after the vehicle was purchased. The owner wrote that there were no cars behind him, and he was able to pull toward a road divider while avoiding any injuries.
The owner of that vehicle shared photos and a video on Twitter, showing the detached steering wheel and the Model Y being towed away. In a subsequent tweet thread, the Tesla owner revealed that he initially received a $104 repair bill to reattach the steering wheel, but the service center later dismissed the charges for the owner.
The Tesla owner then said he lost trust in the electric car company and asked for a full refund. Tesla responded that it doesn’t have a return policy, but agreed to replace his vehicle with a new one and the owner said he was given a loaner Model Y while he waited for the new vehicle to be delivered.
Detached steering wheels are rare in the auto industry, but not unprecedented. In February, for example, Nissan recalled about 1,000 Ariya electric vehicles because the wheels could come off of the steering column due to a loose bolt.
Tesla Safety Concerns
The NHTSA investigation for steering wheel-detachment issues on the 2023 Model Y is one of several recent safety concerns impacting the electric car company.
Since January 2022, Tesla has issued 20 recalls. Many of the recalls have focused on Tesla’s self-driving software. Tesla has fielded test versions of partial and fully self-driving software.
The NHTSA has sent investigators to 35 Tesla crashes in which automated systems are believed to have contributed to the accident. Nineteen people died in those crashes.
Last month, the NHTSA issued what it described as a “recall,” calling for a software update for about 362,000 Tesla vehicles programmed with beta self-driving software after determining the self-driving software allowed vehicles to “exceed speed limits or travel through intersections in an unlawful or unpredictable manner” that it said “increases the risk of a crash.”
Tesla CEO Elon Musk criticized the NHTSA’s “recall” notice for the vehicle software update that could be done remotely, stating in a tweet: “The word ‘recall’ for an over-the-air software update is anachronistic and just flat wrong!”
Tesla has a long-running argument with a safety advocacy group called the Dawn Project, which ran a series of videos of self-driving Tesla vehicles running into child-sized mannequins and appearing to commit other moving violations. The Dawn Project even spent about $600,000 to run a compilation of some of these videos as a Super Bowl commercial. Tesla has called into question the authenticity of these videos and issued a cease and desist letter to the Dawn Project last summer.
NTD News reached out to Tesla for comment, but the company did not respond before this article was published.
The Associated Press contributed to this article.