NHTSA: Nearly 900 Recalls in 2025 Spur Push for OTA-Focused Notices

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is working to update how vehicle recalls are handled, with over-the-air updates central to the effort. Speaking at NHTSA’s Recalls Next summit, Administrator Jonathan Morrison said the agency is pursuing new approaches to increase repair completions, as millions of vehicles remain on the road with open safety recalls.

“What ultimately matters is not the number of mailers sent – what matters is the number of vehicles repaired,” Morrison said.

Why OTA Recalls Work

In 2025, NHTSA oversaw nearly 900 recalls affecting more than 29 million vehicles. Morrison pointed to inconvenience as a leading reason owners skip recall repairs. Even when fixes are free, traveling to a dealership can mean missing work, arranging childcare, or finding alternate transportation, and about four in 10 owners cited inconvenience as a main reason for not completing a recall.

“Over-the-air recall remedies generally result in high completion rates, because they remove the inconvenience of arranging for physical repair,” Morrison said. He added that NHTSA oversees OTA recalls the same way as physical ones and is “exploring ways to provide additional flexibility in the manner of notification.” That could eventually mean fewer paper letters for recalls that have already been fixed.

Tesla Has Been Doing This for Years

Many Tesla owners are already familiar with this model: most Tesla recalls are addressed through a software update, and service visits are only requested when a hardware repair is unavoidable or required by regulators. In 2024, Tesla fixed a TPMS issue affecting about 700,000 vehicles entirely through an OTA update before the recall notice was even published. Around that time, NHTSA started recognizing recalls fixed by software on its website, though owners still received recall letters by mail weeks later.

Tesla uses OTA updates for recalls worldwide. In China, Tesla is addressing a recall of nearly 3 million vehicles over emergency door releases mainly with a software update that lowers the windows after a crash, along with warning stickers for the manual releases.

Other Changes Coming

NHTSA is also making $1.5 million in grants available to help more states include recall information with vehicle registration renewals. Morrison said letters from state DMVs sometimes led to repair rates two to three times higher than notices from manufacturers alone.

The agency also launched a bulk VIN lookup tool that lets dealers and fleet operators check up to 100 vehicles at once. Individual owners can still check whether their Tesla has an open recall using NHTSA’s or Tesla’s VIN lookup.

The summit also covered how OTA recalls apply to autonomous vehicles. NHTSA is accepting public comments through December 5, so changes to how recall notices are delivered could follow sometime after that.