7 ms·

Tesla's ‘Robotaxis' Keep Crashing—Even With Human ‘Safety Monitors' Onboard

84 points by voxadam 1y ago

johnthuss 1y ago
All while Waymo is expanding to more and more cities, including Detroit where it will deal with snow and ice. Waymo is years ahead of Tesla in the self-driving race. It's possible Tesla never succeeds in launching a truly self-driving car.
- LurkandComment 1y ago
  For a fraction of Musk's bonus he could buy Waymo
  - fluidcruft 1y ago
    Musk is gonna buy Alphabet? Fascinating.
    - Octoth0rpe 1y ago
      Alphabet might be willing sell off just waymo.
      - fluidcruft 1y ago
        So the idea is a memestock that can't deliver can just memebuy its competitor with fake money? Pure anti-Capitalist nonsense. Companies fail. Let them die.
      - dylan604 1y ago
        Has Waymo become successful reaching a critical mass of users yet? If so, they would most likely shut it down based on historical examples. Imagine if they had sold those deprecated products instead. Maybe not a financial significance, but there'd be some interesting products still kicking
        deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
        madamelic 1y ago
        Considering Boston Dynamics sat around for like 15 years being a research lab and only started commercializing when they were sold... I'd agree. Argue with that as you like but Google _loves_ to sit around on good ideas and, in my opinion, hamstring them away from pushing their products to commercialization.
        senordevnyc 1y ago
        What's the highest revenue product that Google shut down? Maybe Google+? But I wouldn't be surprised if Waymo is already making way more revenue than Google+ ever did, while barely scratching the surface of immediate demand.
        dylan604 1y ago
        was G+ around long enough to generate revenue at all? there was no activity on it that would have been worthy to buy ad space within it. obviously, theGoog had the advantage of owning the ad space just like they had an advantage of converting all G users to G+ users without consent from those users. Even with that, they still had no users
        senordevnyc 1y ago
        Yeah, I don't blame anyone for thinking Google shuts down products constantly, but to be fair, they're making hundreds of billions per year and the stuff they shut down are almost all little hobby projects that people love, but are a terrible business for them. That's pretty different from shutting down Waymo.
      - 4kchiefofstaff 1y ago
        Alphabet is not stupid. They are doing this to be part of the ecosystem. The same with robots. Before they sell it to some competitor, they will shelf it and will bet on nvidias autonomoes car platform.
  - drivingmenuts 1y ago
    What value does he bring to Tesla? or SpaceX? Or any of his other companies, for that matter?
    - pstuart 1y ago
      He pumps up the meme stock price -- the reason it's so high anyway is from his showboating (autonomous driving! robots! AI! robotaxi! etc...)
- octocop 1y ago
  They are in completely different leagues, the Tesla robotaxi vehicle is probably cost 10x less, at least.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - dachworker 1y ago
    Isn't the lesson from the success of TSLA, that you don't compete on price? That's what made Tesla the first successful EV. Because unlike the rest, they didn't try to compete on price and offer a mass market consumer vehicle. Instead they started with a roadster and then a luxury saloon both targeting the upper end of the market. I don't see the point of a budget taxi car. After all even the human driven counterparts tend to be higher end luxury saloons or SUVs.
    - LorenDB 1y ago
      I assume you mean "sedan" rather than "saloon"?
      - dachworker 1y ago
        It's the British English equivalent.
    - madamelic 1y ago
      Robot Taxis will be competing on price. Whoever can release the lowest cost per mile and most reliable taxi will take lion's share simply because consumers are generally price conscious about transport. Very few will be analyzing the data if two are judged to be 'safe enough', it will come down to price. Companies like BYD and Tesla are positioned well for that if they can get their AV functionality proven out as both are fully integrated car manufacturers. Waymo doesn't have in-house manufacturing and is, to my knowledge, purely software so they have lots of vendors along with a relatively low output of vehicles. Their 2025 and 2026 plan is to build 2,500 new cars per year. Each Waymo car currently costs over $100k. Even if Tesla was pushing out Model Ys as their robotaxi platform, they could flood the market very easily in both scale and price per mile _if_ UFSD (unsupervised FSD) was proven.
- samwillis 1y ago
  I think is really interesting how it's often suggested Waymo is at a disadvantage over Tesla due to its reliance on LIDAR and the costs associated with it. But the reality is that it's enabled Waymo to move faster and gain significant more operational experience than Tesla, and that's far more important than front loading with cost reductions in a service business. Tesla have been operating as a product business, and cost reduction of that product was key to scale and profitability. I completely understand why they have focused on optical sensors for autopilot, lidar was always going to be impossibly expensive for a consumer product. Waymo on the other hand have always been aiming to build a service business and that changes the model significantly, they need to get to market and gain operational experience. Doing that with more expensive equipment to move faster is exactly what was needed. They can worry about cost of building their cars later, much later.
  - 2OEH8eoCRo0 1y ago
    Tesla's strategy is bad. Build something that works first then optimize. They optimized for cost first and may never get it to work.
    - consumer451 1y ago
      That's an interesting take. So, classic premature optimization for scale?
      - xnx 1y ago
        Yes. A normal approach is: 1) Make it work 2) Make it right(/safe) 3) Make it fast/cheap
        consumer451 1y ago
        The surprising thing to me is when you look at Starlink, there was a very expensive blocker there: consumer phased array. Prior to Starlink, I think the cheapest consumer unit was around $50k. That did not stop Musk from charging ahead. Is there some technological thing about LiDAR that would prevent similar cost reductions? Or, is it just the philosophical difference over pre-mapping, and not doing so?
- testing22321 1y ago
  I have no doubt Waymo is ahead of Tesla right now. Why does it then follow that Tesla will never release a truly self driving car? That makes no sense. Is it somehow impossible for an achievement to be reached by more than one person/company? Of course not. The hyperbole is not needed, and does nothing but remove credibility from your statement
  - xnx 1y ago
    > Why does it then follow that Tesla will never release a truly self driving car? Never is a long time, but it's possible that Tesla adopts LIDAR before it gets camera-only to work. There are all kind of historical technological dead-end examples (e.g. planes that flap their wings).
    - testing22321 1y ago
      You mean to say a company or person will change their approach, adapt and grow as they learn how to best achieve their goal? Ummmm yes. That is the definition of doing something difficult.
      - xoa 1y ago
        >You mean to say a company or person will change their approach, adapt and grow as they learn how to best achieve their goal? There's nothing wrong with that in a vacuum, but it's objectively a different story when the company chooses to turn it into an enormous financial liability. That is a massive practical difference, with extremely pertinent example being Tesla vs SpaceX. SpaceX has had enormous success running a hardware rich testing regime, and they're very willing to move fast and break things... but NEVER with customer payloads. Which is how that aphorism was supposed to be applied. You can and often should be extremely aggressive exploring the entire problem space in testing before you move into final build and then production, but once you're dealing with customers then it has to be done very differently. Tesla absolutely could have experimented to their heart's desire without making any financial promises let alone actually entering into end customer contracts and taking hundreds of millions of dollars in preorder money for a future feature on ass-pulled timelines. But that's not the path they took, and that leaves them in a much uglier position when it comes to reacting to data and changing their approach because they've already locked in hardware to paying customers. That's the exact opposite of what SpaceX or any normal responsible company does.
- hnburnsy 1y ago
  It would be sad if Tesla or some other entity doesn't compete in the space? I dont want a monolpoly or even a duopoly. Give me 4 or 5 players for true choice and competition.
  - krupan 1y ago
    Someone should have kept investing in Cruise for that. They were basically on par with Waymo, but then GM stopped the funding and shut Cruise down
- reaperducer 1y ago
  It's possible Tesla never succeeds in launching a truly self-driving car. It doesn't have to. The money's been made. The stock's been pumped. Mission accomplished. As for calling it fraud, well the government's closed. The moose out front should have told 'ya.
josu 1y ago
This reads like a hit piece. Cars crash, that obvious. Are Robotaxis crashing above or below human-driver rates?
- moduspol 1y ago
  And are the crashes leading to fatalities at a higher or lower rate than human drivers?
  - gibolt 1y ago
    This is the key. The known instances I've seen are very minor taps / fender benders. Not great, but not fatal accidents
  - JKCalhoun 1y ago
    Accountability is a pretty big issue, I think. We've accepted, for better or worse, a certain level of human-caused crashes for 100 years or so. If machines take the wheel they have to be an order of magnitude (or more) better.
- hiddencost 1y ago
  Driverless Teslas are the hit pieces. Hitting people. Ayooo. Seriously though, Tesla has an extension history of irresponsibly selling "autopilot" which killed a ton of people. Because they don't take safety seriously. Waymo hasn't.
  - atonse 1y ago
    Can you expand on a "ton" of people? Best source I've found was this wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Tesla_Autopilot_crashes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Tesla_Autopilot_crashe... But I suspect it isn't comprehensive. It's hard to get good data on this for a variety of reasons.
- kachapopopow 1y ago
  well we're comparing waymo to tesla here and tesla is crashing a lot? more than waymo. 4 crashes in 250k miles versus like 10 in nearly 50 million?
ericpauley 1y ago
> Each Tesla robotaxi currently operates with a safety monitor in the driver's seat This is in the article right below a picture of the safety monitor in the passenger seat…
- Workaccount2 1y ago
  The picture is likely old, Tesla had to move them to the driver seat back in september.[1] [1]https://electrek.co/2025/09/03/tesla-moves-robotaxi-safety-monitor-passenger-drivers-seat/ https://electrek.co/2025/09/03/tesla-moves-robotaxi-safety-m...
t1234s 1y ago
Seems to be a smear article. Notice the hero video has to do with a fire at a Tesla dealer.
atonse 1y ago
It feels extremely disingenuous to have a video of burned Teslas (from vandalism) at the top of the article... why do this? Is there any explanation for this except malice? It has absolutely nothing to do with the safety of robotaxis. Isn't it spicy enough to just report on the safety issues from Robotaxis? Also: > But several of the Austin crashes occurred while the vehicles were moving slowly or stationary, one incident involved contact with a fixed object in a parking area. Analysts say this suggests the system's perception and decision-making may not be giving monitors enough time to react, a key issue NHTSA has previously flagged in other FSD-related investigations. Interesting for sure. This is also what some of the FSD influencers see when they test the limits (especially with parking with small obstacles).
- madamelic 1y ago
  All of the four crashes mentioned are low to no speed crashes. At least two, to attestation of another person, was because an inattentive SUV hit the back of the car when it was making a left turn. People really want Tesla to not be good at self-driving. https://old.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/1ojjz5u/tesla_robotaxis_keep_crashing_despite_safety/nm3s9fg/ https://old.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/1ojjz5u/te... None of these crashes occurred at higher than 8 MPH. But yeah, let's not mention Waymo crashing into stationary objects and doing dangerous maneuvers such as cutting opposing traffic off during left turns or making turns from the middle lane despite having like 8x more sensors than Tesla does and pre-trained mapping
  - ipsum2 1y ago
    Please tell me which Waymos have been crashing into stationary objects.
    - madamelic 1y ago
      Waymo hits pole (this one is from 2024, could've sworn I saw one in the last few weeks but may have misremembered): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HAZP-RNSr0s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HAZP-RNSr0s Waymos crash into each other: https://www.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/1mdl5zn/two_waymo_cars_collided_in_phoenix_today/ https://www.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/1mdl5zn/tw... Waymo cutting off bus at left turn: https://www.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/1o9accg/when_we_ask_waymo_to_be_more_aggressive_this_is/ https://www.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/1o9accg/wh... Waymo doing... something... no clue how a pre-mapped car thinks this is ok: https://www.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/1lmq7rl/waymo_makes_an_illegal_left/ https://www.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/1lmq7rl/wa... Waymo sideswipes firetruck with its lights on: https://www.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/1mj4w8d/waymo_bumps_into_firetruck/ https://www.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/1mj4w8d/wa... --- Crashes happen. Tesla is currently having a rash of them but Waymo isn't immune to "wtf how" kinds of crashes even with all of its built-in advantages (far more sensors and having pre-mapping).
fabian2k 1y ago
The Electrek article (https://electrek.co/2025/10/29/tesla-robotaxis-keep-crashing-despite-safety-monitors/ https://electrek.co/2025/10/29/tesla-robotaxis-keep-crashing...) contains more information. It's 4 crashes in around 250,000 miles. But Tesla redacts most information in these reports unlike e.g. Waymo, so the information is limited. If Tesla wants people to trust them regarding safety, this is not the way to go. Personally, I'd be interested in how often the safety drivers had to intervene. But I assume we'll never get that information.
- atonse 1y ago
  Yeah this article was better – can we just change the link to that one? It also mentioned that Tesla hasn't registered for a permit in CA, which would require disclosing a lot more (like what you're asking for). Which is telling.
- kakacik 1y ago
  If true thats seriously bad stat. You buy a car, if you drive even modestly, in 15-20 years you will end up in 3-5 accidents on average. Much worse than me with mildly less kms (0 bad accidents, 1 light, few times avoiding them via quick reactions in complex situations that most probably no current self-drive could handle well if at all, ie hearing car crashes behind the bend and breaking in advance, or few cars behind us and moving a bit further to avoid being also hit in bowling style).
  - vel0city 1y ago
    And this is with a driver behind the wheel.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
  - esalman 1y ago
    10 years, 200k+ miles, I only been in one "accident" where I ran into a street sign. And I took my eye of the road, unlike Tesla, which have robotic camera watching the road at all time.
api 1y ago
The root of Tesla's problems here is Musk's decision to drop LIDAR. The reasoning, I think, was that humans can drive using sight and a little bit of sound, so an AI should be able to do this too. Humans can do this because we have a very rich well-developed world model that allows us to fill in the gaps. We don't do it perfectly but we can do it decently well. Modern AIs, or at least the ones small enough to be run on smaller machines that are economical to put in cars, don't have a rich world model like that. They're doing stimulus response backed by a database. That's going to break down at all kinds of edge cases. The way to compensate for this is to give the car superhuman senses like LIDAR. The car is much dumber than a person but it can perceive its environment orders of magnitude better than a person, which compensates well enough that it has a chance of driving at least as well as a person.
- Avshalom 1y ago
  Pretty sure the actual reasoning was that the lidar equipment was in limited supply during the initial covid year(s).
- ableal 1y ago
  > The reasoning, I think, was that humans can drive using sight and a little bit of sound, so an AI should be able to do this too. If memory serves, a few years ago the official position, on a Karpathy presentation, was that if radar contradicted vision they would have to discard one, so they would stick to vision only. I could never swallow that argument - seems obvious that a radar failsafe would keep you from making bad vision errors ...
- jacobgorm 1y ago
  I don't think it is only a matter of building a better world model. CCD sensors work very differently than human eyes and have problems such as over- and underexposure that preclude their use for safe driving in certain conditions. If you were to try driving a car with a VR headset fed from dual CCD sensors into a sunset as in https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2025-tesla-full-self-driving-crash/ https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2025-tesla-full-self-driv... you would get into trouble too.
BurritoKing 1y ago
As a massive advocate of FSD (and someone who's currently running 14.1.4, their very latest FSD build) it is absolutely in no way ready for unsupervised FSD. It still makes silly mistakes, and the latest build is terrified of leaves and will swerve across lane dividers to desperately avoid a leaf blowing into it's path. I love FSD, I use it for 99% of my driving, and when it's working right it's an incredibly technology that overall makes my driving safer, but there's absolutely areas of weakness that every FSD user knows it cannot be trusted in under any circumstances and you must closely supervise and be ready to take over at any time.
Workaccount2 1y ago
Elon already stopped talking about the robotaxi and is now onto the Optimus bot, which should buy him at least another year or two of swindling investors.
- b112 1y ago
  It's a long term R&D project that's been going on for a decade. HN: No one does R&D anymore. So sad. Elon R&D: autopilot didn't work out, so everything Elon is involved in is a scam and never works. Go ahead and dislike the guy, but nobody on the planet has his track record of success and think big. And he's succeeded over and over and over and over again. Frankly I don't know anyone as successful in modern times. Note that his success does not mean I like him, or not. It is simple reality, data.
  - hermitcrab 1y ago
    The swindling?
  - Workaccount2 1y ago
    No doubt, but his ability to deliver has totally faltered. He also built himself as an ideologue, which has/will greatly impact the ability to attract and retain talent. At the end of the day, Elon is still relying on smart people to execute these projects. Elon is looking a lot like the amazing artist who had a golden era of great works, and now is killing himself trying to fake his way back to his former self.
hermitcrab 1y ago
Perhaps Musk is so busy making up shit about what is happening in the UK and trying to foment a civil war there, that he doesn't have time to manage Tesla?
natch 1y ago
We don’t know the details. It could be that the human drivers were in control at the time of the incidents and caused some of them. It could also be that other cars driven by humans caused them. Web sites hosting these clickbait articles have zero incentive to make things sound less dramatic. An obvious tell is that they’ll use the word “crash” for a Tesla bumping a parking bollard.
testing22321 1y ago
> But several of the Austin crashes occurred while the vehicles were moving slowly or *stationary* Ah yes, the old “crashed while stationary bug”. Hard to fix, that one.
Simulacra 1y ago
Didn't this happen before with a safety monitor on their phone? I seem to remember another Robo taxi company and it hit someone who was crossing the street.
- madamelic 1y ago
  That was Cruise and it killed the entire company.
  - xnx 1y ago
    I believe they're referring to Uber here. "Uber's self-driving operator charged over fatal crash" https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-54175359 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-54175359
th0masfrancis 1y ago
Looks like Waymo just killed a cat. https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/waymo-killed-cat-21136038.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/waymo-killed-cat-2113...
- chneu 1y ago
  Cats shouldn't be outside. A human driver probably would have hit the cat, too. Heck, my neighbor in his F250 purposefully hits cats and brags about it.
  - wrboyce 1y ago
    The American fetish with locking cats indoors is extremely weird, and your neighbour sounds like a first class bellend (and the one who belongs in confinement, at best).
    - reaperducer 1y ago
      The American fetish with locking cats indoors Today I learned that part of "America" is in the southern hemisphere. https://www.australiangeographic.com.au/news/2024/05/roaming-cat-ban/ https://www.australiangeographic.com.au/news/2024/05/roaming...
      - ozozozd 1y ago
        Those stats on “how free roaming pet cats harm the society” will be a tiny bit hard to believe for anyone who has spent more than a few hours in Istanbul. Assuming the pet cat in Australia is the same pet cat in Europe.
        reaperducer 1y ago
        As it happens, I've spent quite a lot of time in Istanbul. Those are feral cats, not pet cats.
        1y ago

84 points by voxadam 1y ago

All while Waymo is expanding to more and more cities, including Detroit where it will deal with snow and ice. Waymo is years ahead of Tesla in the self-driving race. It's possible Tesla never succeeds in launching a truly self-driving car.

LurkandComment 1y ago
For a fraction of Musk's bonus he could buy Waymo
- fluidcruft 1y ago
  Musk is gonna buy Alphabet? Fascinating.
  - Octoth0rpe 1y ago
    Alphabet might be willing sell off just waymo.
    - fluidcruft 1y ago
      So the idea is a memestock that can't deliver can just memebuy its competitor with fake money? Pure anti-Capitalist nonsense. Companies fail. Let them die.
    - dylan604 1y ago
      Has Waymo become successful reaching a critical mass of users yet? If so, they would most likely shut it down based on historical examples. Imagine if they had sold those deprecated products instead. Maybe not a financial significance, but there'd be some interesting products still kicking
      - deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
      - madamelic 1y ago
        Considering Boston Dynamics sat around for like 15 years being a research lab and only started commercializing when they were sold... I'd agree. Argue with that as you like but Google _loves_ to sit around on good ideas and, in my opinion, hamstring them away from pushing their products to commercialization.
      - senordevnyc 1y ago
        What's the highest revenue product that Google shut down? Maybe Google+? But I wouldn't be surprised if Waymo is already making way more revenue than Google+ ever did, while barely scratching the surface of immediate demand.
        dylan604 1y ago
        was G+ around long enough to generate revenue at all? there was no activity on it that would have been worthy to buy ad space within it. obviously, theGoog had the advantage of owning the ad space just like they had an advantage of converting all G users to G+ users without consent from those users. Even with that, they still had no users
        senordevnyc 1y ago
        Yeah, I don't blame anyone for thinking Google shuts down products constantly, but to be fair, they're making hundreds of billions per year and the stuff they shut down are almost all little hobby projects that people love, but are a terrible business for them. That's pretty different from shutting down Waymo.
    - 4kchiefofstaff 1y ago
      Alphabet is not stupid. They are doing this to be part of the ecosystem. The same with robots. Before they sell it to some competitor, they will shelf it and will bet on nvidias autonomoes car platform.
- drivingmenuts 1y ago
  What value does he bring to Tesla? or SpaceX? Or any of his other companies, for that matter?
  - pstuart 1y ago
    He pumps up the meme stock price -- the reason it's so high anyway is from his showboating (autonomous driving! robots! AI! robotaxi! etc...)
octocop 1y ago
They are in completely different leagues, the Tesla robotaxi vehicle is probably cost 10x less, at least.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- dachworker 1y ago
  Isn't the lesson from the success of TSLA, that you don't compete on price? That's what made Tesla the first successful EV. Because unlike the rest, they didn't try to compete on price and offer a mass market consumer vehicle. Instead they started with a roadster and then a luxury saloon both targeting the upper end of the market. I don't see the point of a budget taxi car. After all even the human driven counterparts tend to be higher end luxury saloons or SUVs.
  - LorenDB 1y ago
    I assume you mean "sedan" rather than "saloon"?
    - dachworker 1y ago
      It's the British English equivalent.
  - madamelic 1y ago
    Robot Taxis will be competing on price. Whoever can release the lowest cost per mile and most reliable taxi will take lion's share simply because consumers are generally price conscious about transport. Very few will be analyzing the data if two are judged to be 'safe enough', it will come down to price. Companies like BYD and Tesla are positioned well for that if they can get their AV functionality proven out as both are fully integrated car manufacturers. Waymo doesn't have in-house manufacturing and is, to my knowledge, purely software so they have lots of vendors along with a relatively low output of vehicles. Their 2025 and 2026 plan is to build 2,500 new cars per year. Each Waymo car currently costs over $100k. Even if Tesla was pushing out Model Ys as their robotaxi platform, they could flood the market very easily in both scale and price per mile _if_ UFSD (unsupervised FSD) was proven.
samwillis 1y ago
I think is really interesting how it's often suggested Waymo is at a disadvantage over Tesla due to its reliance on LIDAR and the costs associated with it. But the reality is that it's enabled Waymo to move faster and gain significant more operational experience than Tesla, and that's far more important than front loading with cost reductions in a service business. Tesla have been operating as a product business, and cost reduction of that product was key to scale and profitability. I completely understand why they have focused on optical sensors for autopilot, lidar was always going to be impossibly expensive for a consumer product. Waymo on the other hand have always been aiming to build a service business and that changes the model significantly, they need to get to market and gain operational experience. Doing that with more expensive equipment to move faster is exactly what was needed. They can worry about cost of building their cars later, much later.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 1y ago
  Tesla's strategy is bad. Build something that works first then optimize. They optimized for cost first and may never get it to work.
  - consumer451 1y ago
    That's an interesting take. So, classic premature optimization for scale?
    - xnx 1y ago
      Yes. A normal approach is: 1) Make it work 2) Make it right(/safe) 3) Make it fast/cheap
      - consumer451 1y ago
        The surprising thing to me is when you look at Starlink, there was a very expensive blocker there: consumer phased array. Prior to Starlink, I think the cheapest consumer unit was around $50k. That did not stop Musk from charging ahead. Is there some technological thing about LiDAR that would prevent similar cost reductions? Or, is it just the philosophical difference over pre-mapping, and not doing so?
testing22321 1y ago
I have no doubt Waymo is ahead of Tesla right now. Why does it then follow that Tesla will never release a truly self driving car? That makes no sense. Is it somehow impossible for an achievement to be reached by more than one person/company? Of course not. The hyperbole is not needed, and does nothing but remove credibility from your statement
- xnx 1y ago
  > Why does it then follow that Tesla will never release a truly self driving car? Never is a long time, but it's possible that Tesla adopts LIDAR before it gets camera-only to work. There are all kind of historical technological dead-end examples (e.g. planes that flap their wings).
  - testing22321 1y ago
    You mean to say a company or person will change their approach, adapt and grow as they learn how to best achieve their goal? Ummmm yes. That is the definition of doing something difficult.
    - xoa 1y ago
      >You mean to say a company or person will change their approach, adapt and grow as they learn how to best achieve their goal? There's nothing wrong with that in a vacuum, but it's objectively a different story when the company chooses to turn it into an enormous financial liability. That is a massive practical difference, with extremely pertinent example being Tesla vs SpaceX. SpaceX has had enormous success running a hardware rich testing regime, and they're very willing to move fast and break things... but NEVER with customer payloads. Which is how that aphorism was supposed to be applied. You can and often should be extremely aggressive exploring the entire problem space in testing before you move into final build and then production, but once you're dealing with customers then it has to be done very differently. Tesla absolutely could have experimented to their heart's desire without making any financial promises let alone actually entering into end customer contracts and taking hundreds of millions of dollars in preorder money for a future feature on ass-pulled timelines. But that's not the path they took, and that leaves them in a much uglier position when it comes to reacting to data and changing their approach because they've already locked in hardware to paying customers. That's the exact opposite of what SpaceX or any normal responsible company does.
hnburnsy 1y ago
It would be sad if Tesla or some other entity doesn't compete in the space? I dont want a monolpoly or even a duopoly. Give me 4 or 5 players for true choice and competition.
- krupan 1y ago
  Someone should have kept investing in Cruise for that. They were basically on par with Waymo, but then GM stopped the funding and shut Cruise down
reaperducer 1y ago
It's possible Tesla never succeeds in launching a truly self-driving car. It doesn't have to. The money's been made. The stock's been pumped. Mission accomplished. As for calling it fraud, well the government's closed. The moose out front should have told 'ya.

josu 1y ago

This reads like a hit piece. Cars crash, that obvious. Are Robotaxis crashing above or below human-driver rates?

moduspol 1y ago
And are the crashes leading to fatalities at a higher or lower rate than human drivers?
- gibolt 1y ago
  This is the key. The known instances I've seen are very minor taps / fender benders. Not great, but not fatal accidents
- JKCalhoun 1y ago
  Accountability is a pretty big issue, I think. We've accepted, for better or worse, a certain level of human-caused crashes for 100 years or so. If machines take the wheel they have to be an order of magnitude (or more) better.
hiddencost 1y ago
Driverless Teslas are the hit pieces. Hitting people. Ayooo. Seriously though, Tesla has an extension history of irresponsibly selling "autopilot" which killed a ton of people. Because they don't take safety seriously. Waymo hasn't.
- atonse 1y ago
  Can you expand on a "ton" of people? Best source I've found was this wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Tesla_Autopilot_crashes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Tesla_Autopilot_crashe... But I suspect it isn't comprehensive. It's hard to get good data on this for a variety of reasons.
kachapopopow 1y ago
well we're comparing waymo to tesla here and tesla is crashing a lot? more than waymo. 4 crashes in 250k miles versus like 10 in nearly 50 million?

ericpauley 1y ago

> Each Tesla robotaxi currently operates with a safety monitor in the driver's seat This is in the article right below a picture of the safety monitor in the passenger seat…

Workaccount2 1y ago
The picture is likely old, Tesla had to move them to the driver seat back in september.[1] [1]https://electrek.co/2025/09/03/tesla-moves-robotaxi-safety-monitor-passenger-drivers-seat/ https://electrek.co/2025/09/03/tesla-moves-robotaxi-safety-m...

t1234s 1y ago

Seems to be a smear article. Notice the hero video has to do with a fire at a Tesla dealer.

atonse 1y ago

It feels extremely disingenuous to have a video of burned Teslas (from vandalism) at the top of the article... why do this? Is there any explanation for this except malice? It has absolutely nothing to do with the safety of robotaxis. Isn't it spicy enough to just report on the safety issues from Robotaxis? Also: > But several of the Austin crashes occurred while the vehicles were moving slowly or stationary, one incident involved contact with a fixed object in a parking area. Analysts say this suggests the system's perception and decision-making may not be giving monitors enough time to react, a key issue NHTSA has previously flagged in other FSD-related investigations. Interesting for sure. This is also what some of the FSD influencers see when they test the limits (especially with parking with small obstacles).

madamelic 1y ago
All of the four crashes mentioned are low to no speed crashes. At least two, to attestation of another person, was because an inattentive SUV hit the back of the car when it was making a left turn. People really want Tesla to not be good at self-driving. https://old.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/1ojjz5u/tesla_robotaxis_keep_crashing_despite_safety/nm3s9fg/ https://old.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/1ojjz5u/te... None of these crashes occurred at higher than 8 MPH. But yeah, let's not mention Waymo crashing into stationary objects and doing dangerous maneuvers such as cutting opposing traffic off during left turns or making turns from the middle lane despite having like 8x more sensors than Tesla does and pre-trained mapping
- ipsum2 1y ago
  Please tell me which Waymos have been crashing into stationary objects.
  - madamelic 1y ago
    Waymo hits pole (this one is from 2024, could've sworn I saw one in the last few weeks but may have misremembered): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HAZP-RNSr0s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HAZP-RNSr0s Waymos crash into each other: https://www.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/1mdl5zn/two_waymo_cars_collided_in_phoenix_today/ https://www.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/1mdl5zn/tw... Waymo cutting off bus at left turn: https://www.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/1o9accg/when_we_ask_waymo_to_be_more_aggressive_this_is/ https://www.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/1o9accg/wh... Waymo doing... something... no clue how a pre-mapped car thinks this is ok: https://www.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/1lmq7rl/waymo_makes_an_illegal_left/ https://www.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/1lmq7rl/wa... Waymo sideswipes firetruck with its lights on: https://www.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/1mj4w8d/waymo_bumps_into_firetruck/ https://www.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/1mj4w8d/wa... --- Crashes happen. Tesla is currently having a rash of them but Waymo isn't immune to "wtf how" kinds of crashes even with all of its built-in advantages (far more sensors and having pre-mapping).

fabian2k 1y ago

The Electrek article (https://electrek.co/2025/10/29/tesla-robotaxis-keep-crashing-despite-safety-monitors/ https://electrek.co/2025/10/29/tesla-robotaxis-keep-crashing...) contains more information. It's 4 crashes in around 250,000 miles. But Tesla redacts most information in these reports unlike e.g. Waymo, so the information is limited. If Tesla wants people to trust them regarding safety, this is not the way to go. Personally, I'd be interested in how often the safety drivers had to intervene. But I assume we'll never get that information.

atonse 1y ago
Yeah this article was better – can we just change the link to that one? It also mentioned that Tesla hasn't registered for a permit in CA, which would require disclosing a lot more (like what you're asking for). Which is telling.
kakacik 1y ago
If true thats seriously bad stat. You buy a car, if you drive even modestly, in 15-20 years you will end up in 3-5 accidents on average. Much worse than me with mildly less kms (0 bad accidents, 1 light, few times avoiding them via quick reactions in complex situations that most probably no current self-drive could handle well if at all, ie hearing car crashes behind the bend and breaking in advance, or few cars behind us and moving a bit further to avoid being also hit in bowling style).
- vel0city 1y ago
  And this is with a driver behind the wheel.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- esalman 1y ago
  10 years, 200k+ miles, I only been in one "accident" where I ran into a street sign. And I took my eye of the road, unlike Tesla, which have robotic camera watching the road at all time.

api 1y ago

The root of Tesla's problems here is Musk's decision to drop LIDAR. The reasoning, I think, was that humans can drive using sight and a little bit of sound, so an AI should be able to do this too. Humans can do this because we have a very rich well-developed world model that allows us to fill in the gaps. We don't do it perfectly but we can do it decently well. Modern AIs, or at least the ones small enough to be run on smaller machines that are economical to put in cars, don't have a rich world model like that. They're doing stimulus response backed by a database. That's going to break down at all kinds of edge cases. The way to compensate for this is to give the car superhuman senses like LIDAR. The car is much dumber than a person but it can perceive its environment orders of magnitude better than a person, which compensates well enough that it has a chance of driving at least as well as a person.

Avshalom 1y ago
Pretty sure the actual reasoning was that the lidar equipment was in limited supply during the initial covid year(s).
ableal 1y ago
> The reasoning, I think, was that humans can drive using sight and a little bit of sound, so an AI should be able to do this too. If memory serves, a few years ago the official position, on a Karpathy presentation, was that if radar contradicted vision they would have to discard one, so they would stick to vision only. I could never swallow that argument - seems obvious that a radar failsafe would keep you from making bad vision errors ...
jacobgorm 1y ago
I don't think it is only a matter of building a better world model. CCD sensors work very differently than human eyes and have problems such as over- and underexposure that preclude their use for safe driving in certain conditions. If you were to try driving a car with a VR headset fed from dual CCD sensors into a sunset as in https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2025-tesla-full-self-driving-crash/ https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2025-tesla-full-self-driv... you would get into trouble too.

BurritoKing 1y ago

As a massive advocate of FSD (and someone who's currently running 14.1.4, their very latest FSD build) it is absolutely in no way ready for unsupervised FSD. It still makes silly mistakes, and the latest build is terrified of leaves and will swerve across lane dividers to desperately avoid a leaf blowing into it's path. I love FSD, I use it for 99% of my driving, and when it's working right it's an incredibly technology that overall makes my driving safer, but there's absolutely areas of weakness that every FSD user knows it cannot be trusted in under any circumstances and you must closely supervise and be ready to take over at any time.

Workaccount2 1y ago

Elon already stopped talking about the robotaxi and is now onto the Optimus bot, which should buy him at least another year or two of swindling investors.

b112 1y ago
It's a long term R&D project that's been going on for a decade. HN: No one does R&D anymore. So sad. Elon R&D: autopilot didn't work out, so everything Elon is involved in is a scam and never works. Go ahead and dislike the guy, but nobody on the planet has his track record of success and think big. And he's succeeded over and over and over and over again. Frankly I don't know anyone as successful in modern times. Note that his success does not mean I like him, or not. It is simple reality, data.
- hermitcrab 1y ago
  The swindling?
- Workaccount2 1y ago
  No doubt, but his ability to deliver has totally faltered. He also built himself as an ideologue, which has/will greatly impact the ability to attract and retain talent. At the end of the day, Elon is still relying on smart people to execute these projects. Elon is looking a lot like the amazing artist who had a golden era of great works, and now is killing himself trying to fake his way back to his former self.

hermitcrab 1y ago

Perhaps Musk is so busy making up shit about what is happening in the UK and trying to foment a civil war there, that he doesn't have time to manage Tesla?

natch 1y ago

We don’t know the details. It could be that the human drivers were in control at the time of the incidents and caused some of them. It could also be that other cars driven by humans caused them. Web sites hosting these clickbait articles have zero incentive to make things sound less dramatic. An obvious tell is that they’ll use the word “crash” for a Tesla bumping a parking bollard.

testing22321 1y ago

> But several of the Austin crashes occurred while the vehicles were moving slowly or *stationary* Ah yes, the old “crashed while stationary bug”. Hard to fix, that one.

Simulacra 1y ago

Didn't this happen before with a safety monitor on their phone? I seem to remember another Robo taxi company and it hit someone who was crossing the street.

madamelic 1y ago
That was Cruise and it killed the entire company.
- xnx 1y ago
  I believe they're referring to Uber here. "Uber's self-driving operator charged over fatal crash" https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-54175359 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-54175359

th0masfrancis 1y ago

Looks like Waymo just killed a cat. https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/waymo-killed-cat-21136038.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/waymo-killed-cat-2113...

chneu 1y ago
Cats shouldn't be outside. A human driver probably would have hit the cat, too. Heck, my neighbor in his F250 purposefully hits cats and brags about it.
- wrboyce 1y ago
  The American fetish with locking cats indoors is extremely weird, and your neighbour sounds like a first class bellend (and the one who belongs in confinement, at best).
  - reaperducer 1y ago
    The American fetish with locking cats indoors Today I learned that part of "America" is in the southern hemisphere. https://www.australiangeographic.com.au/news/2024/05/roaming-cat-ban/ https://www.australiangeographic.com.au/news/2024/05/roaming...
    - ozozozd 1y ago
      Those stats on “how free roaming pet cats harm the society” will be a tiny bit hard to believe for anyone who has spent more than a few hours in Istanbul. Assuming the pet cat in Australia is the same pet cat in Europe.
      - reaperducer 1y ago
        As it happens, I've spent quite a lot of time in Istanbul. Those are feral cats, not pet cats.
        1y ago