Tesla’s Full Self-Driving feature has always lived in a grey area between marketing and reality. Now it’s in a different kind of spotlight. In October 2025, US safety regulators opened a fresh investigation into about 2.88 million Teslas equipped with FSD after reports of cars running red lights and even steering into oncoming lanes. A Reuters report notes 58 incident complaints, including 14 crashes and 23 injuries linked to FSD-supervised driving.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s preliminary evaluation covers most modern Teslas—Model 3, Y, S, X, and Cybertruck—running FSD or FSD Beta. The agency says it has documented repeated cases of cars driving through red lights, drifting into oncoming traffic during lane changes, and misbehaving at intersections and railroad crossings. A detailed Washington Post breakdown highlights clusters of similar crashes at the same junctions, suggesting systemic software issues rather than random driver error.
What This Means for Your Daily Driving
Right now, nothing has been switched off. There’s no recall yet, and your Tesla will still let you toggle FSD on. Tesla maintains that FSD is a “supervised” driver-assist system and does not make the car autonomous—which is technically true but runs hard against the promise implied by the name.
From the driver’s seat, the risk is simple. When a system is branded “Full Self-Driving,” some owners will relax more than they should. Yet regulators are logging real-world cases where FSD makes exactly the kind of mistakes you buy driver-assist technology to avoid: red-light violations, wrong-way lane changes, and confusion at complex intersections. If you use FSD today, you’re effectively part of a live experiment now being audited by the federal government.
What you are looking at: a timeline of major NHTSA investigations, recalls, and Tesla FSD/Autopilot software updates, so you can compare how often regulators step in with how often the code actually changes.
My Verdict
If you already own a Tesla, treat FSD like a beta program, not a magic button. Basic Autopilot for highway cruising is one thing; handing city streets and intersections over to a system under active federal investigation is something else. Until Tesla can show, with independent data, that FSD handles those edge-case moments better than a switched-on human, the bravest move is the boring one: keep your hands on the wheel, your eyes up, and use FSD—if at all—as a test feature, not as your daily driver.
