When seatbelts turn out not to be anchored, it's a safety risk so basic that only a report or two is enough to get federal safety investigators mobilized.
The National Highway Traffic Safety administration on Tuesday said it is investigating 50,000 Tesla Model X SUVs after complaints from two owners who said their seatbelts pulled away from the seat frames.
NHTSA said its preliminary investigation covers 2022 and 2023 model year vehicles with front seatbelts that came loose from the belt anchor pretensioner while driving.
Neither incident involved a collision, NHTSA said, nor injuries. But NHTSA said its initial investigation showed the late-model vehicles had been delivered with "insufficiently connected anchor linkages." It said the linkage was held to the seat merely by a "friction fit" that gave way under load.
A Tesla owner in Larkspur, California, reported that he was driving at 10-15 mph when the driver's door of a parked truck opened suddenly and his SUV's auto-braking system activated.
"With the sudden deceleration, my upper body flung forward and the force of my weight caused the seatbelt anchor on the lower seat to detach completely," his complaint filed with NHTSA said.
After NHTSA opens a preliminary evaluation, it must decide whether to upgrade it to an engineering analysis before it can demand a recall. NHTSA is currently investigating a number of complaints pertaining to Teslas, including steering wheels that can potentially come off in a driver's hands, phantom braking and ramming into emergency vehicles, and other issues with Autopilot/Full Self-Driving functions.
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