The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has officially closed its investigation into unexpected braking events across hundreds of thousands of Tesla vehicles. The probe, which dragged on for more than four years, examined what drivers colloquially call “phantom braking,” where cars slam on the brakes for no apparent reason.

The conclusion, which landed around July 1, 2026, effectively gives Tesla a regulatory all-clear on the issue.

What the investigation actually found

NHTSA opened preliminary evaluation PE22002 on February 16, 2022, after a wave of complaints started rolling in around November 2021. The initial scope covered roughly 416,000 Tesla Model 3 and Model Y vehicles from the 2021 and 2022 model years.

Over the life of the probe, NHTSA collected 354 total complaints. The pattern was oddly specific: most incidents happened in sunny weather where shadows were present on the road. The typical event involved sudden deceleration of 10 to 20 mph over a span of one to three seconds. No obstacles were actually present in these cases, and none of the reported incidents resulted in collisions.

The complaint trajectory fell off sharply. NHTSA recorded 45 phantom braking incidents throughout 2024. Since January 2026, that number has dropped to just three.

Why the problem appeared, and why it faded

The timeline of complaints maps almost perfectly onto a major technical shift at Tesla. In 2021, the company began transitioning its vehicles to a vision-only sensing system, ditching radar in favor of cameras and neural networks to interpret the road. The surge in complaints starting in late 2021 coincided directly with this hardware and software transition.

Tesla responded with firmware updates throughout 2022 aimed at refining how the vision system interprets ambiguous visual data. The steady decline from 2022 through 2026 suggests the software matured meaningfully over successive iterations.

What this means for Tesla and its investors

A preliminary evaluation is not the same thing as a formal recall investigation. NHTSA never escalated this probe to that more serious tier, which would have been the step before potentially mandating a recall. The closure of a preliminary evaluation means the agency reviewed the data, watched the complaint trend improve, and decided there wasn’t enough there to justify escalation.

NHTSA has been increasingly active in scrutinizing advanced driver-assistance systems across the industry. The agency still has other open investigations related to Tesla’s Autopilot and its involvement in various crash incidents. Closing the phantom braking probe doesn’t mean Tesla has a blank check from regulators.