One-Pedal Driving Isn’t A Safety Issue: Feds

• NHTSA has closed an investigation into Tesla’s one-pedal driving.
• A defect investigation from 2023 claimed that the feature was responsible for unintended acceleration.
• The feds say that the feature is not unique to Tesla and isn’t actually a defect.

When moving from an ICE-powered car to an EV, one of the first things to get used to is one-pedal driving. Thanks to the magic of magnets (and regenerative braking), the wasted power normally turned into heat by the friction of brake pads is diverted back into the car’s battery pack, allowing many EVs to stop without you having to hit the brake pedal at all. Unfortunately, it does have a bit of a learning curve for folks who have never used it before.

Tesla, which is just one of the many automakers that employ one-pedal driving, had a run-in with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) over the feature. After a careful review, NHTSA has finally sided with Tesla and closed out its investigation, saving the automaker from potentially needing to issue a recall for more than 2 million cars sold all the way back to 2013. Here’s what happened.

Photo by: Andrei Nedelea

The original concern leading up to the investigation was centered around “pedal misapplication,” which is a polite way of saying that drivers could accidentally confuse the gas pedal with the brake function and yeet themselves into a storefront or stop sign.

This wasn’t a new theory at all. Prior to the defect petition, owners have been theorizing unintended acceleration was due to pedal misapplication for nearly a decade. But the formal petition, which was submitted to the agency three years ago in March 2023, is now closed with a message that officially takes the blame off of Tesla.

According to NHTSA, there are only a handful of crashes potentially liked to the issue. And in those cases, the vehicle logs show that the cars responded correctly to driver inputs—meaning, they went “go” when the pedal was depressed by the driver.

The feds also issued a crucial reminder that one-pedal driving is not unique to Tesla:

The use of regenerative braking controlled by the accelerator pedal, or one-pedal driving, is common across most light vehicle manufacturers of electric vehicles and Tesla vehicles are not unique in this respect.

A denial of the petition means that NHTSA found no evidence in the defect and will end its investigation. And accordingly, it will not move forward with any of the proposed safeguards in the petition, like requiring drivers to actually press the brake pedal to require the car to come to a complete stop.

Chock it up to a win for Tesla. Or, at least a non-loss—Tesla still has 10 NHTSA investigations open into issues like its door controls, steering wheels detaching, unexpected braking, and a separate unintended acceleration issue. 

But really, this is a win for EV owners as a whole. One-pedal driving is a fairly popular feature and, in many cars, can be toggled on or off. Keeping a safe, efficient, and optional control in a vehicle should be seen across the industry as a win for consumer choice. As long as it doesn’t suck, that is.