What the NHTSA Closed

The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration formally closed its three-year investigation into 2023 Tesla Model Y vehicles on 28 April 2026, ending the probe without recall or required action. The case, filed under reference PE23003 in March 2023, opened after two separate reports of Model Y steering wheels detaching from the column while the cars were being driven.

NHTSA's final scope covered 120,089 units of the 2023 Model Y. Investigators concluded that the failure was limited to those two original vehicles, both of which had left the factory without the bolt that fixes the steering wheel to the column. The agency found no systemic design defect and no further confirmed incidents during the three-year review window.

Why It Took Three Years

A federal preliminary evaluation usually closes within about a year. PE23003 ran longer because the agency examined whether the issue extended beyond the two confirmed cases, requesting incident data and production records from Tesla and waiting on additional consumer reports — none of which produced a third confirmed detachment. Tesla itself stated that the missing-bolt scenario was a manufacturing-line slip on a small batch of early-production cars and was corrected on the line shortly afterwards.

What This Means for European Owners

The formal closure does not change anything for European Model Y owners. Two relevant points:

  • The two affected vehicles were both 2023 US-build cars. No European Model Y has ever been linked to the steering-detachment failure in NHTSA filings or in regulatory actions taken by Germany's KBA, France's UTAC, or the UK's DVSA.
  • NHTSA explicitly noted that closing the case "does not preclude reopening if new evidence emerges". The agency retained the right to revisit the issue if a comparable failure surfaces on later builds.

For European owners more broadly, the close-out also matters because it removes one of the data points that EU regulators occasionally cite when discussing Tesla's manufacturing quality. The final NHTSA finding — two cars, single root cause, single production-line fix — undermines the framing of a wider quality problem.

A Rare Closure Without Corrective Action

Most NHTSA preliminary evaluations against Tesla over the past three years have resulted in either an OTA recall (counted by NHTSA as a corrective action) or an extension into a deeper engineering analysis. PE23003 is one of the few that closes cleanly with no required action, and that outcome leans on a narrow technical finding: the missing retaining bolt was a manufacturing-line slip on two cars, not a design defect across the fleet.

The agency emphasised that the closure does not rule out a safety-related defect and that it can reopen the issue if new evidence emerges. For now, however, owners of the 120,089 units in the original probe scope have no outstanding action items tied to this case.