NHTSA Complaint #11592897 — 2022 TESLA MODEL Y

Two incidents: 1) Non-accident: My wife was slowing to make a right turn at a stop light and the steering locked up for about 3 seconds, where she wasn't able to regain manual steering control. We did not have full self-driving mode at the time. Luckily, she was only going about 10 mph, and was able to brake before running into oncoming traffic. 2) Accident: Our son was driving on a country road, along a section with a slight curve. We had a free trial for full self-driving mode during the previous month, but it ended two weeks before the accident, so he could not have had it in self-driving mode. It appears that he didn't make the curve, but as evidenced by a single long tire skid mark, continued almost perfectly straight, across the oncoming lane, and ran into a redwood tree. The car rolled and ended up upside down, against the bank back on the right side of the road, with the lithium batteries on fire. Our son and his passenger sustained severe injuries and neither has a memory of what caused the accident. Naturally we suspect the possibility that the steering locked up again. But it also seems likely that the AEB and ABS were not functioning correctly, as if they were, there should have been several short skid marks for the tires on both sides of the car, rather than only a single long skid mark. Additionally, there's no shoulder on that road, and there is a clump of bushes that come very close to the white line, so it's possible that a steering auto-correct initiated the incident. We have not yet been able to recover EDR or log data from the vehicle.