By Marie Mannes
STOCKHOLM (Reuters) -Norway’s traffic safety regulator said on Thursday it had found no basis for ordering a recall of Tesla’s S and X Model vehicles following an investigation into a suspension safety issue.
The Norwegian regulatory review was prompted by over a dozen customer reports to the agency in 2022 about the rear lower control arm suddenly breaking.
“The Norwegian Public Roads Administration (NPRA) believes that a break in the rear lower control arm does not constitute an unacceptable risk, and that there is no basis for demanding a recall of the vehicles,” the regulator said in a statement.
It will continue to monitor the situation, it said.
NPRA said that the decision not to recall was made because the reported cases happened when the car was travelling at low speed, often when reversing.
It also said that the number of reported cases was low compared to the total number of S and X Models in Norway.
Tesla did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The company told the regulator in August it believed the probability of a severe issue with a compromised or broken rear lower control arm was low.
Such an error “would not constitute any safety risk and hazard,” it said in documents obtained by Reuters through a Freedom of Information Act request.
The news follows a Reuters investigation in December which exposed how Tesla has blamed drivers for frequent failures of suspension and steering parts that it has long known were defective, such as the lower control arm.
Tesla subsequently said in a post on Musk’s social media platform X that the Reuters report was “riddled with incomplete and demonstrably incorrect information.”
The Reuters investigation found that Tesla’s control arm failures were a significant problem in Norway, one of the company’s biggest European markets.
Sweden’s safety regulator said Norway’s decision did not affect its ongoing probe of the same issues.
(Reporting by Marie Mannes, writing by Stine Jacobsen and Marie Mannes, editing by Terje Solsvik)
