Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, speaks during the official opening of Tesla’s new electric car manufacturing plant on March 22, 2022 near Gruenheide, Germany.
Christian Marquardt | Getty Images
The German wheeled traffic agency said it was withdrawing the Tesla Y and 3 models due to a failure in the automatic emergency call system affecting 59,000 vehicles worldwide.
The KBA control dog said on its June 29 website that a software failure was causing a failure of the eCall, which is designed to automatically contact emergency services in the event of a serious accident.
German regional broadcaster Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg, which serves the region that hosts Tesla’s German Model Y and the battery production site near Berlin, first reported the withdrawal on Saturday.
KBA said 59,129 vehicles were affected worldwide, but did not specify how many of them were registered in Germany.
The software failure is an additional headache for CEO Elon Musk, after Tesla said Saturday it delivered 17.9 percent fewer electric vehicles in the second quarter than the previous quarter, as the shutdown of the China related to Covid-19 discontinued its production and supply chain.
Musk said last month that Tesla’s new factories in Texas and Berlin are “losing billions of dollars” as they struggle to increase production due to battery shortages and Chinese port problems.
The U.S. National Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) in early June upgraded its probe to 830,000 Tesla vehicles with the advanced Autopilot driver assistance system, a necessary step before it could request a withdrawal.
Tesla was not immediately available for comment.
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