After initially resisting calls to do so, electric car manufacturer Tesla has agreed to recall thousands of vehicles over issues with touch screens.
The recall comes after the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration urged Tesla in a letter last month to recall 135,000 Model X sport-utility-vehicles and Model S luxury sedans.
"That’s very rare and really it’s one of the final steps before going to a public hearing and legal action," said Tom Higgins, technology and autos reporter with the Wall Street Journal.
The issue is with the vehicles’ touch screen failures, features that are becoming inoperable after five or six years. As reported by the Wall Street Journal, the screens can fail when a memory chip runs out of storage. Important functions like defrosting, turn signals and driver assistance are impacted in the outages.
The company tried to unsuccessfully use over-the-air updates to remedy the problem.
"Tesla has argued that it wasn’t a defect and that they’re doing this recall to provide a better customer experience, but one of the things they said to the government in their most recent letter is that it’s not technologically or economically feasible for these components to last a lifetime of the car," he said.
The vehicles in question were manufactured between 2012 and 2018, with an estimated 12,000 already experiencing the issue as of last summer.
The recalls will reportedly cost Tesla up to $250 million.
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