EVwire brief: U.S. regulators closed a probe into Tesla’s Actually Smart Summon (ASS) after finding incidents were rare and limited to minor, low-speed impacts.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) said its investigation into Tesla’s ASS system, which was opened in January 2025 and covered about 2.59 million vehicles, identified only a fraction of incidents across millions of uses, with no injuries, fatalities, or major crashes reported.
Most events involved minor property damage, such as contact with parking gates, nearby vehicles, or low obstacles. According to the agency, nearly all recorded incidents occurred early in Summon sessions and were tied to situational awareness limitations.
The NHTSA’s probe into ASS has been closed
Only a fraction of 1% of ASS sessions recorded an incident
In several cases, app users did not have a full 360-degree view of their surroundings through the Tesla app’s interface, reducing their ability to anticipate obstacles during maneuvers like reversing in tight spaces.
Two incidents involved vehicles operating in snowy conditions where forward-facing cameras were partially or fully obstructed. In both cases, the system did not detect the blockage, and users did not intervene despite visible obstruction in the Tesla app’s video feed.
A separate incident involved failure to yield to a garage gate arm, again with no user-initiated stop command.
Actually Smart Summon allows Teslas to move towards a specified point completely driverless. Despite its capabilities, Tesla makes it a point to highlight that ASS must only be used in areas that are familiar and predictable.
Here’s Tesla’s promotional video for ASS:
Tesla deployed multiple OTA updates to address ASS edge cases
During the NHTSA’s investigation period, Tesla issued a series of over-the-air software updates aimed at improving the performance of ASS.
These updates introduced:
enhanced camera blockage detection
improved handling of snow and condensation interference
upgraded object detection and perception for dynamic obstacles such as gate arms
Tesla also improved ASS’s performance by adding object detections from a separate neural network.
The first OTA update to improve the feature was released on January 15, 2025, less than two weeks after the NHTSA announced its preliminary evaluation into ASS. The last OTA update related to the issue was released on November 20, 2025.
Here’s a video of Actually Smart Summon in action, posted in early October 2025. By this time, Tesla had already rolled out the majority of its ASS improvements to its fleet.
Owners of affected vehicles, which include Model S, Model X, Model 3, and Model Y units, received a total of six over-the-air software updates for their ASS system.
These ASS improvements were also rolled into production software.
The NHTSA concluded that incident rates were extremely low relative to total usage and that severity remained minimal. With this, the NHTSA opted to close its investigation.
“Out of millions of Summon sessions, a fraction of 1% resulted in an incident… Due to low incident occurrence and low incident severity, this preliminary evaluation is closed.”
The NHTSA, however, also emphasized that the closure of its ASS probe does not rule out future action if new evidence emerges.
Source: NHTSA
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