NHTSA Complaint #11528663 — 2023 TESLA MODEL Y

On a trip to Prescott, AZ and back to Los Angeles, I encountered the following problem about 5 separate times. While driving at freeway speeds (70-80mph), the car suddenly and violently, without warning, applied the brakes vary hard (with no input from me). This threw me forward while the car continued to decelerate. In one instance, there was a class C motorhome traveling behind me fairly closely as if to pass. This was on a 2-lane road in the Arizona “countryside.” It was between 6:20am and 7:15am on Saturday, May 13th. The motorhome following me had to make a split-second decision to either crash into the rear of my car, or swing out left into the oncoming lane. He chose the latter. Fortunately, there was no oncoming traffic or it surely would have been a fatal, head-on accident between the motorhome and a car traveling in the opposite direction in the oncoming lane. The motorhome then continued to pass me and no accident resulted. In the other 4 times that the brakes suddenly applied, there was no one close enough behind me where they could not have slowed down to avoid an accident. Obviously, this was very disturbing to me. I finally realized that the Automatic Emergency Braking (AEB) feature was set to “on” (by default). I then turned it off. No further incidents occurred after this. At this point, I will not travel on a busy freeway with the AEB feature activated……it is simply too dangerous. If this issue happens on a busy freeway, the likelihood of someone crashing into the rear of my car is fairly high.