Tesla must provide NHTSA with Autopilot recall data by July or face up to $135 million in fines
Tesla vehicles sit on the lot at a Tesla dealership in Austin, Texas, on April 15, 2024.
Brandon Bell | Getty Images
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is pressing Tesla for answers about changes the company made to its Autopilot driver assistance system following a voluntary software recall in December that affected about 2 million vehicles in the U.S.
Tesla must meet a deadline of July 1 to provide information to the regulator or face fines up to $135.8 million, according to a letter sent by the NHTSA to company on May 6.
The recall was intended to improve Tesla’s driver-engagement systems, which are used to monitor whether drivers are safely using features like traffic aware cruise control, lane keeping and auto steering — part of Autopilot. Since the recall, at least 20 Tesla vehicles have been involved in crashes in which the system was thought to be in use, according to a filing on the NHTSA’s website.
The “recall remedy” probe follows a three-year investigation by the agency that found safety issues with Tesla Autopilot contributed to at least 467 collisions and 14 deaths from January 2018 through August 2023.
The NHTSA had concluded that drivers involved in those crashes “were not sufficiently engaged in the driving task and that the warnings provided by Autopilot when Autosteer was engaged did not adequately ensure that drivers maintained their attention on the driving task.”
Driver-engagement systems, sometimes known as driver-monitoring systems, in Tesla vehicles include torque sensors in the steering wheel to detect whether drivers are keeping their hands on the wheel, and in-cabin cameras that monitor a driver’s gaze. They should alert any inattentive driver to pay attention and stay ready to steer or brake at any time.
The NHTSA is seeking detailed crash data from the electric vehicle maker since the agency issued the recall update on Autopilot, including data and video stored in or streamed from its cars and retained by the company.
They’re also asking for records about Tesla’s engineering teams and their approach to “safety defect determination decision making,” “issue investigation,” “action design including human factors considerations (initial and modifications),” and “testing.”
Tesla is in the middle of a massive reorganization and sweeping layoffs. The company hasn’t disclosed how many jobs in its Autopilot and vehicle-safety engineering teams may have been cut.
For about a decade, CEO Elon Musk has been promising that Tesla is on the cusp of a self-driving breakthrough. With sales of Tesla EVs dropping in the first quarter, Musk has been focusing investors’ attention on his dream of a future full of Tesla artificial intelligence products, including robotaxis and “sentient” humanoid robots that can do factory work.
Tesla shares fell 3.8% on Tuesday to $177.81 and are down 28% year to date.
In an aerial view, a Tesla showroom at 12845 N. US 183 Highway Service Road is seen after police were called for a suspicious device in Austin, Texas, on March 24, 2025.
Brandon Bell | Getty Images
With Elon Musk looking to June 22 as his tentative start date for Tesla’s pilot robotaxi service in Austin, Texas, protesters are voicing their opposition.
Public safety advocates and political protesters, upset with Musk’s work with the Trump administration, joined together in downtown Austin on Thursday to express their concerns about the robotaxi launch. Members of the Dawn Project, Tesla Takedown and Resist Austin say that Tesla’s partially automated driving systems have safety problems.
Tesla sells its cars with a standard Autopilot package, or a premium Full Self-Driving option (also known as FSD or FSD supervised), in the U.S. Automobiles with these systems, which include features like automatic lane keeping, steering and parking, have been involved in dozens of collisions, some fatal, according to data tracked by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
Tesla’s robotaxis, which Musk showed off in a video clip on X earlier this week, are new versions of the company’s popular Model Y vehicles, equipped with a future release of Tesla’s FSD software. That “unsupervised” FSD, or robotaxi technology, is not yet available to the public.
Tesla critics with The Dawn Project, which calls itself a tech-safety and security education business, brought a version of Model Y with relatively recent FSD software (version 2025.14.9) to show residents of Austin how it works.
In their demonstration on Thursday, they showed how a Tesla with FSD engaged zoomed past a school bus with a stop sign held out and ran over a child-sized mannequin that they put in front of the vehicle.
Dawn Project CEO Dan O’Dowd also runs Green Hills Software, which sells technology to Tesla competitors, including Ford and Toyota.
Stephanie Gomez, who attended the demonstration, told CNBC that she didn’t like the role Musk had been playing in the government. Additionally, she said she has no confidence in Tesla’s safety standards and said there’s been a lack of transparency from Tesla regarding how its robotaxis will work.
Another protester, Silvia Revelis, said she also opposed Musk’s political activity, but that safety is the biggest concern.
“Citizens have not been able to get safety testing results,” she said. “Musk believes he’s above the law.”
Tesla didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
— Todd Wiseman contributed to this report.
WATCH: Tesla’s next leg up is $400
23andMe founder Anne Wojcicki speaks during a House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform hearing in Washington, D.C., on June 10, 2025.
Andrew Harnik | Getty Images
Anne Wojcicki, the co-founder and former CEO of 23andMe, has regained control over the embattled genetic testing company after her new nonprofit, TTAM Research Institute, outbid Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, the company announced Friday.
TTAM will acquire substantially all of 23andMe’s assets for $305 million, including its Personal Genome Service and Research Services business lines as well as telehealth subsidiary Lemonaid Health. It’s a big win for Wojcicki, who stepped down from her role as CEO when 23andMe filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in March.
Last month, Regeneron announced it would purchase most of 23andMe’s assets for $256 million after it came out on top during a bankruptcy auction. But Wojcicki submitted a separate $305 million bid through TTAM and pushed to reopen the auction. TTAM is an acronym for the first letters of 23andMe, according to The Wall Street Journal.
“I am thrilled that TTAM Research Institute will be able to continue the mission of 23andMe to help people access, understand and benefit from the human genome,” Wojcicki said in a statement.
23andMe gained popularity because of its at-home DNA testing kits that gave customers insight into their family histories and genetic profiles. The five-time CNBC Disruptor 50 company went public in 2021 via a merger with a special purpose acquisition company. At its peak, 23andMe was valued at around $6 billion.
The company struggled to generate recurring revenue and stand up viable research and therapeutics businesses after going public, and it has been plagued by privacy concerns since hackers accessed the information of nearly seven million customers in 2023.
TTAM’s acquisition is still subject to approval by the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Eastern District of Missouri.
Oracle CEO Safra Catz speaks at the FII PRIORITY Summit in Miami Beach, Florida, on Feb. 20, 2025.
Joe Raedle | Getty Images
Oracle shares enjoyed their best week since 2001 as Wall Street cheered a strong earnings report and bullish comments on the company’s prospects in cloud computing.
The stock jumped about 24% for the week, with almost all the gains coming in the two trading days after the company’s quarterly earnings release. The last time Oracle had a better week was in April 2001, in the midst of the dot-com crash, when so-called dead-cat bounces were common. The prior quarter Oracle shares lost almost half their value.
It’s a much different company today, and while Oracle was generally viewed as a late entrant into the cloud infrastructure market, the company has found a niche and is seeing rapid growth helping clients operate artificial intelligence models.
“Oracle is in the enviable position of having more demand than it can fulfill,” Joseph Bonner, an analyst at Argus Research, wrote in a note to clients on Friday. He recommends buying the shares and lifted his price target to $235 from $200.
Oracle rose to a record on Friday, closing at $215.22.
In the company’s earnings report late Wednesday, revenue and earnings topped estimates. CEO Safra Catz said sales for the new fiscal year should come in above $67 billion, higher than LSEG’s $65.18 billion consensus.
“The demand is astronomical,” Larry Ellison, Oracle’s chairman told analysts on the earnings call. “But we have to do this methodically. The reason demand continues to outstrip supply is we can only build these data centers, build these computers, so fast.”
Oracle has been playing catchup in cloud to rivals Amazon, Google and Microsoft.
In the 2025 fiscal year, Oracle’s capital expenditures exceeded $21 billion, which is more than the company spent from 2019 to 2024. The sum should reach $25 billion in fiscal 2026, Catz said on the call.
Google anticipates $75 billion in capital spending this year. Microsoft’s target for the fiscal year is $80 billion.
Oracle’s client list now includes Meta, OpenAI and Elon Musk’s xAI. They’re among the companies that require the most Nvidia graphics processing units to train generative AI models that create text, images and videos in response to a few words of human input.
Startups Baseten, Physical Intelligence and Vast Data are also cloud clients, Oracle announced this week.
“We will build and operate more cloud infrastructure data centers than all of our cloud infrastructure competitors combined,” Ellison said.
Oracle shares are up 29% so far in 2025, while the Nasdaq is up less than 1%. Among the most highly valued U.S. tech companies, the next best performer for the year is Meta, which is up around 17%.
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