AI incident #889 ·
Tesla's 'Actually Smart Summon' Feature Reportedly Linked to Multiple Parking Lot Collisions
What happened
Tesla's "Actually Smart Summon" feature, a remote parking system controlled via a smartphone app, reportedly failed to detect obstacles such as cars, walls, and parking signs, resulting in at least 16 collision incidents. The NHTSA is investigating safety concerns, including delayed user response times, potential overreliance on camera-only navigation, and noncompliance with crash reporting rules.
Only the incident metadata is stored here. The underlying news reports are on the AI Incident Database (CC BY-SA 4.0); use the links above to read them.
News reports (2)
Coverage catalogued by the AI Incident Database. Titles link to the original publisher; the text is not reproduced here.
Who was involved
Classification (MIT AI Risk Repository taxonomy)
- Risk domain
- AI system safety, failures, and limitations
- Risk subdomain
- 7.3 Lack of capability or robustness
- Causal entity
- AI
- Intent
- Unintentional
- Timing
- Post-deployment
- Harm level
- —
- Sectors
- —
- Countries
- —
Risk entries describing this failure mode
Entries from the MIT AI Risk Repository coded to subdomain 7.3.
- Reliability issues
"Relying on general-purpose AI products that fail to fulfil their intended function can lead to harm. For example, general- purpose AI systems can make up facts (‘hallucination’), generate erroneous computer code, or pro...
- Type 2: Bigger than expected
Harm can result from AI that was not expected to have a large impact at all, such as a lab leak, a surprisingly addictive open-source product, or an unexpected repurposing of a research prototype.
- Type 3: Worse than expected
AI intended to have a large societal impact can turn out harmful by mistake, such as a popular product that creates problems and partially solves them only for its users.
- Ethics and Morality Issues
LMs need to pay more attention to universally accepted societal values at the level of ethics and morality, including the judgement of right and wrong, and its relationship with social norms and laws.
- Safe learning
"AGIs should avoid making fatal mistakes during the learning phase. Subproblems include safe exploration and distributional shift (DeepMind, OpenAI), and continual learning (Berkeley)."
- Malign belief distributions
"Christiano (2016) argues that the universal distribution M (Hutter, 2005; Solomonoff, 1964a,b, 1978) is malign. The argument is somewhat intricate, and is based on the idea that a hypothesis about the world often includ...
- Meta-cognition
"Agents that reason about their own computational resources and logically uncertain events can encounter strange paradoxes due to Godelian limitations (Fallenstein and Soares, 2015; Soares and Fallenstein, 2014, 2017) an...
- Misaligned consequentialist reasoning
"As we think about even more intelligent and advanced AI assistants, perhaps outperforming humans on many cognitive tasks, the question of how humans can successfully control such an assistant looms large. To achieve the...
Incidents in the same risk subdomain
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- PocketOS Production Database Was Reportedly Deleted by Cursor AI Agent Running Claude Opus 4.6
- Baidu Apollo Go Robotaxis Stopped in Traffic During Reported System Failure in Wuhan, Stranding Some Passengers
- Purportedly AI-Enabled Targeting System Was Reportedly Implicated in Deadly U.S. Strike on Iranian Primary School
- Claude Code Agent Reportedly Deleted DataTalks.Club Production Infrastructure, Database, and Snapshots via Terraform
- Purportedly AI-Generated Sepsis Alert Reportedly Prompted Potentially Inappropriate IV Fluid Administration for a Dialysis Patient, Averted by Clinician Intervention
Other incidents involving Tesla
- Tesla Cybertruck Operating in Full Self-Driving Mode Reportedly Crashes into Pole in Nevada After Failing to Merge
- Tesla on Autopilot Struck Parked Work Truck on Highway in Pennsylvania
- Tesla Failed to Yield to Detected Pedestrian on Crosswalk, Reportedly Violated Traffic Law
- Tesla Allegedly on Autopilot Struck High School Student Exiting School Bus
- Tesla Driver Put Car on Autopilot Before Falling Asleep in Germany
- Sudden Braking by Tesla Allegedly on Self-Driving Mode Caused Multi-Car Pileup in Tunnel