Tesla
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American electric vehicle company Tesla Inc. has announced one of its largest-ever recallings till date-approximately 135, 000 Model S and Model X sport utility vehicles over touch-screen failures.

Last month, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) requested a recall, stating concerns over the touch- screens in these cars. It was alleged that the touch screen in some models can fail when a memory chip runs out of storage capacity, affecting functions such as defrosting, turn-signal functionality, and driver assistance. The NHTSA announced that the Model S sedans were having these problems.

Tesla announced that it was recalling the vehicles to put an end to the investigation while disagreeing that the issue was a defect in the vehicles. “It is economically, if not technologically, infeasible to expect that such components can or should be designed to last the vehicle’s entire useful life,” Tesla said in a letter to the federal regulators. The company revealed that it would replace the hardware for free in phases.

Tesla had delivered around 500, 000 vehicles around the world last year, with approximately 40% of them being in the United States alone. Guidehouse Insights analyst Sam Abuelsamid gave an estimate of $200-250 million for the cost of the recall. Federal regulators have revealed that this problem could take around five to six years to manifest, and efforts to correct the problem through over-the-air updates have been insufficient.

This is not the first time Tesla has recalled several models for various reasons. It had recalled approximately 123, 000 Model S vehicles in 2018 over the corrosion of bolts in cold weather.

Tesla’s market valuation is currently at $796 billion, recording around $19 billion in cash holdings at the end of 2020. Furthermore, it has reported six consecutive profitable quarters.