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Tesla reports another Robotaxi crash
- boringg 10mo ago[flagged]
- Tagbert 10mo agoThey are just reporting what is happening. Tesla has been making some really bad product calls for the last couple of years.
- 93po 10mo agoInflammatory, misleading headlines is not the same as "reporting what's happening"
- youarentrightjr 10mo agoSorry, what's the claim here? That electrek has a financial incentive in Tesla's failure? Or that they are reporting inaccurately?
- mmooss 10mo ago> what's the claim here? The claim is that Musk is a victim.
- boringg 10mo agoFALSE the claim is that website was anti Tesla while Tesla was trying to build out the electric car market up until about 2018. Which is the funniest thing given that they are a supposedly pro electric vehicles website per name. They switched once they realized Tesla was actually manufacturing a successful car at the time. It's worth remember how these companies think historically instead of whitewashing the past.
- mmooss 10mo agoSo Musk is really a victim of this website. Unless you say the contrary in all caps.
- boringg 10mo agoThe claim is that website was providing back information for about 3-4 years because they didn't like Tesla. That invalidates them as a source because they have a bias against that company. Not as you say "musk is really a victim of the website". I do appreciate your excellent level of trolling though - we could use better level of intelligence out there.
- mmooss 9mo agoAh, now the website is biased against poor Musk and I'm trolling you. It's seems that you'll never have to address the issues, just attack anyone who disagrees.
- bryanlarsen 10mo agoElectrek were huge Tesla boosters until about 2019 or so when Tesla voided the 2 Tesla Roadsters that Electrek staff earned through the referral program.
- boringg 10mo agoActually that is incorrect - they were historically very against Tesla as a company until 2015-2018 being hugely skeptical of Tesla.
- _ea1k 10mo ago[flagged]
- DoesntMatter22 10mo agoThey are basically Anti Tesla propaganda, as Fred has admitted.
- _ea1k 10mo agoYes, regardless of the product quality, this article really pushes hard to find a negative narrative without thinking about alternative explanations. There are real, legitimate concerns here, but they are hidden behind a lot of assumptions.
- thomassmith65 10mo agoWith 7 reported crashes at the time, Tesla’s Robotaxi was crashing roughly once every 40,000 miles [...]. For comparison, the average human driver in the US crashes about once every 500,000 miles. This means Tesla’s “autonomous” vehicle, which is supposed to be the future of safety, is crashing 10x more often than a human driver. That is a possible explanation for why Musk believes in people having 10x as many children. /s
- TheAmazingRace 10mo agoWhen you have a CEO like Elon who swears up and down that you only need cameras for autonomous driving vehicles, and skimping out on crucial extras like Li-DAR, can anyone be surprised by this result? Tesla also likes to take the motto of "move fast and break things" to a fault.
- DoesntMatter22 10mo agoTurns out Waymo hits a lot of things too. Why isn't Lidar stopping that?
- mmooss 10mo agoWhat is Waymo's accident rate? (Edit: Tesla's is in the article, at least for that region.)
- tasty_freeze 10mo agoand there is a linked article about Waymo's data reporting, which is much more granular and detailed, whereas Tesla's is lumpy and redacted. Anyway, Waymo's data with more than 100M miles of self-supervised driving shows a 91% reduction in accidents vs humans. Tesla's is 10x the human accident rate according to the Austin data.
- TheAmazingRace 10mo agoLast I checked, Robotaxi has a safety driver, whereas Waymo is completely self driving, yet has a very good safety record. That speaks volumes to me. https://waymo.com/safety/impact/ https://waymo.com/safety/impact/
- 7e 10mo agoWho will save humanity from Elon Musk?
- platevoltage 10mo agoHumanity could save themselves if they would get over their Stockholm Syndrome.
- altairprime 10mo agoSlap a STUDENT DRIVER bumper sticker on them so we can all give them space!
- kevin_thibedeau 10mo agoIt should say INDUSTRIAL ROBOT. You wouldn't willingly enter the hazard zone of a KUKA. Why should we casually accept them roaming free?
- 0_____0 10mo agoIf you're familiar with industrial hazard mitigation, looking at how roadways are constructed is kind of crazy making.
- dylan604 10mo agoI'm now imagining Robotaxis with the impact absorbing extensions that highway trucks have when leading the lane closures. Something like this: https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhv-eLOJwqhhaoB_9KG38G_9ejl2zqwuizYCqI-P7woLLgBIMqJ7Ri3iC1zT9xJW3W_gCn-qTXOMHndgkJkUiv0D1tmA41xto-zMXZ6cLXx5EPLr2NSWJhaEOBukUb1twrK96bsDo-M6nfyDEWYM5ZoWttGdGFKH6rHMtfkuSrfOdy21DoVR7UZxwixVSE/s850/road-warrior.jpg https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh...
- altairprime 10mo agoMost people don’t know that characteristic of industrial robots, so it wouldn’t inspire the wariness necessary to keep the novice robotic vehicles safe from us all assuming predictability of them. And those who do know what it means would assume predictable behaviors, since that’s what industrial robots have, which is doubly problematic since now they’ll be unprepared for SQUIRREL input, RED OCTAGON output neural network misfirings.
- dzhiurgis 10mo agoFunny how one side of commenters scream these are roaming free and killing people while others say they are still crashing with all the babysitting by safety driver.
- koinedad 10mo agoThe title makes it sound way worse than the 7 reported crashes listed in the article. I’d be interested to see a comparison with Waymo and other self driving technologies in the same area (assuming the exist).
- phyzome 10mo agoConverting things to rates is how you understand them in a meaningful way, particularly for things that are planned to be expanded to full scale. (The one thing I would like to see done differently here is including an error interval.)
- _ea1k 10mo agoYeah, I'm glad that they are trying to do a rate, the problem is that the numerator in the human case is likely far larger than what they are indicating. Of the Tesla accidents, five of them involved either collisions with fixed objects, animals, or a non-injured cyclist. Extremely minor versions of these with human drivers often go unreported. Unfortunately, without the details, this comparison will end up being a comparison between two rates with very different measurement approaches.
- phyzome 10mo agoWith Tesla redacting as much as they are, I think we have to assume the worst.
- Rebelgecko 10mo agoI couldn't find Waymo's stats for all crashes in 12 seconds of googling, but they have breakdowns for "crashes with serious injury" (none yet) "crashes resulting in injury" (5x reduction) and "crashes where airbag deployed" (14x reduction), relative to humans in Austin Austin has relatively low miles so the confidence intervals are wider but not too far from what they show for other cities
- tomhow 10mo agoWe updated the title to the original. All, please remember the section of the guidelines about editorialising of title. Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- bparsons 10mo agoThis is the sort of thing that occurs when the interests of the public become subordinate to the interests of a lawless aristocracy. Financial, social and public safety considerations are costs that can be transferred to the public to preserve the wealth of a few individuals.
- themafia 10mo agoWas there a time when the interests of the public weren't subordinate?
- davidw 10mo agoIt's not a binary on/off thing. It's a lot, lot worse right now.
- cosmicgadget 10mo agoIn the aristocracy's defense, we voted for this.
- Zigurd 10mo agoWithout taking money out of politics, the assertion that "we" are to blame has to assume advertising and influence peddling doesn't work.
- cosmicgadget 10mo agoWe can be subject to influence and still remain responsible for our own actions.
- Zigurd 10mo agoEven if we had the perfect combination of public funding and low small dollar donation limits we would still need discernment and to take responsibility for our votes. Nevertheless, getting big money donations out of politics would be a big improvement.
- nodesocket 10mo ago[flagged]
- tigranbs 10mo agoIMHO, this is not too bad! But obviously, coming from the software product industry, everyone knows that building features isn't the same as operating in practice and optimizing based on the use case, which takes a ton of time. Waymo has a huge head start, and it is evident that the "fully autonomous" robotaxi date is far behind what Elon is saying publicly. They will do it, but it is not as close as the hype suggests.
- phyzome 10mo ago...why would "more than 10x less safe than a human driver" be "not too bad"?
- dylan604 10mo agoIt could have been 100x or 1000x or...
- Rebelgecko 10mo ago"worse than a human" seems like a fail
- phyzome 10mo agoThe entire premise of self-driving cars, at least from a policy perspective, is "safer than human drivers".
- verteu 10mo agoIt's pretty bad given there's a Tesla employee behind the wheel supervising.
- 93po 10mo agoThere's no evidence the supervisor was behind the wheel for any of these, and I've never seen footage at all where they werent in the passenger seat
- 10mo ago
- Veserv 10mo agoThe most damning thing is that the most advanced version, with the most modern hardware, with perfectly maintained vehicles, running in a pre-trained geofence that is pre-selected to work well [1] with trained, professional safety drivers, with scrutinized data and reporting average a upper bound of 40,000 miles per collision (assuming the mileage numbers were not puffery [3]). Yet somehow they claim that old versions, using old hardware, on arbitrary roads, using untrained customers as safety drivers somehow average 2.9 million miles per collision in non-highway environments [2], a ~72.5x difference in collision frequency, and 5.1 million miles per collision in all environments, a ~175x(!) difference in collision frequency, when their reporting and data are not scrutinized. I guess their most advanced software and hardware and professional safety drivers just make it 175x more dangerous. [1] https://techcrunch.com/2025/05/20/musk-says-teslas-self-driving-tests-will-be-geofenced-to-the-safest-parts-of-austin/ https://techcrunch.com/2025/05/20/musk-says-teslas-self-driv... [2] https://www.tesla.com/fsd/safety https://www.tesla.com/fsd/safety [3] https://www.forbes.com/sites/alanohnsman/2025/08/20/elon-musks-self-driving-tesla-lies-are-finally-catching-up-to-him/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/alanohnsman/2025/08/20/elon-mus... [3.a] Tesla own attorneys have argued that statements by Tesla executives are such nonsense that no reasonable person would believe them.
- randoglando 10mo agoIt's because of selection bias. In the older vehicles, customers won't turn on autopilot if they think it won't handle the situation. So, they turn it on highways and easier paths.
- AnthonyMouse 10mo agoThere is also another possibility. People often don't report minor accidents. Someone scrapes a pole without causing enough damage to hit their insurance deductible, are they going to file a police report? Mostly not. And then the older number had that in it and the newer one doesn't. But the number for human drivers works like the old number. They're dividing miles driven by reported accidents. On top of that, they're using the average -- by miles -- which isn't the same as the median, and in particular that will over-represent drivers who drive the most miles, who are disproportionately professional drivers.
- natch 10mo agoMost minor fender benders are not reported by the involved people, whereas even the most minor ones often caused by other humans must be assiduously reported by any company doing such a rollout. A responsible journalist with half a clue would mention that, and tell us how that distorts the numbers. If we correct for this distortion, it’s clear that the truth would come out in Tesla’s favor here. Instead the writer embraces the distortion, trying to make Tesla look bad, and one is left to wonder if they are intentionally pushing a biased narrative.
- bryanlarsen 10mo agoEvery 40,000 miles is every 2nd year for the average American. Every 500,000 miles is once in a lifetime for the average American. Using your own personal experience, it should be obvious that trivial fender benders are more common than once per lifetime but significantly less common than one every couple of years.
- natch 10mo agoMy household alone has had two fender benders in the past six weeks, one of which will not be reported (and, maybe not relevant, both the fault of other drivers). Zooming out in time they are less common but most are unreported. The big question would be whether the 40,000 number includes unreported incidents.
- wizardforhire 10mo agoHow many more people have to die? In the past it took a lot less to get the situation fixed… and these were horrendous situations! [1][2] And yet tesla is a factor of 10 worse! [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Pinto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Pinto [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firestone_and_Ford_tire_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firestone_and_Ford_tire_contro...
- ajross 10mo agoFTA: "For comparison, the average human driver in the US crashes about once every 500,000 miles." Does anyone know what the cite for this might be? I'm coming up empty. To my knowledge, no one (except maybe insurance companies) tallies numbers for fender bender style accidents. This seems like a weirdly high number to me, it's very rare to find any vehicle that reaches 100k miles without at least one bump or two requiring repair. My suspicion is that this is a count of accidents involving emergency vehicle or law enforcement involvement? In which case it's a pretty terrible apples/oranges comparison.
- habosa 10mo agoYeah as much as I think that Tesla is full of shit, there’s no way this is true. I don’t know a single person that’s driven 500k miles lifetime but everyone I know has been in at least one minor accident.
- bryanlarsen 10mo agoThe average American drives more than 600k miles in a lifetime.
- ajross 10mo agoNot to nitpick, but that means if you sample randomly then you're going to find that the great majority of Americans have, in fact, driven less than 500k miles in their life. Also I don't think that's correct; that's a ton of driving! I strongly suspect the number you're citing is the number of miles an average American spends in a road vehicle, not actually driving it. But that counts the same "car-mile" multiple times for all the occupants, when the statistic we're arguing about right now is about the vehicle, not the occupants.
- senordevnyc 10mo agoYeah, I think that might be the stat for “serious” accidents
- _ea1k 10mo ago
- jmpman 10mo agoI’m still waiting until I see little X Æ A-Xii playing in the street while Tesla Robotaxis deliver passengers before I buy these arguments. Until then, my children are playing in the street while these autonomous vehicles threaten their safety. I’m upset that this is forced upon the public by the government.
- 93po 10mo agoElectrek notoriously lies and fibs and stretches the truth to hate on Tesla and Elon as much as possible when it serves their own best interests. This one is misleading both in that 8 "crashes" is statistically insignificant to draw conclusions as to its safety compared to humans, but also because these 'crashes' are not actually crashes and instead a variety of things, including hitting a wild animal of unknown size or potentially minor contact with other objects of unspecified impact strength. They make other unsubstantiated and likely just wrong claims: > The most critical detail that gets lost in the noise is that these crashes are happening with a human safety supervisor in the driver’s seat (for highway trips) or passenger seat, with a finger on a kill switch. The robotaxi supervisors are overwhelmingly only the passenger seat - I've never actually seen any video footage of them in the driver seat, and Electrek assuredly has zero evidence of how many of the reported incidents involved someone in the driver seat. Additionally, these supervisors in the passenger seat are not instructed to prevent every single incident (they arent going to emergency brake for a squirrel) and to characterize them as "babysitting to prevent accidents" is just wrong. This article is full of other glaring problems and lies and mistruths but it's genuinely not worth the effort to write 5 pages on it. If you want some insight on why Fed Lambert might be doing this, look no further than the bottom of the page: Fred gives (sells?) "investment tips" which, you guessed it, are perpetually trying to convince people to sell and short Telsa: https://x.com/FredLambert/status/1831731982868369419 https://x.com/FredLambert/status/1831731982868369419 Feel free to look at his other posts: it's 95% trying to convince people that Telsa is going bankrupt tomorrow, and trying to slam Elon as much as possible - sometimes for good reasons (transphobia) but sometimes in ways that really harms his credibility, if he actually had any Lambert has also been accused of astrotrufing in lawsuits, and had to go through a settlement that required him to retract all the libel he had spread: https://www.thedrive.com/tech/21838/the-truth-behind-electreks-dark-alliance-with-tesla https://www.thedrive.com/tech/21838/the-truth-behind-electre... That same source also touches on Fred and Seth's long history of swinging either side of the bandwagon in attempts to maximize personal gain off bullshit reporting. And basically being a massive joke in automotive reporting. The owner of Eletrek, Seth Weintraub, also notably does the same thing: https://x.com/llsethj/status/1217198837212884993 https://x.com/llsethj/status/1217198837212884993
- Mawr 10mo ago
- narrator 10mo agoI can imagine why they redact the reports so much: Elon hating NGOs would gladly pay a lawyer to spend as much time suing Tesla for each crash, even if completely frivolously and with no hope of recouping any of the time and money spent, and think they were doing the great work of social justice.
- NedF 10mo ago[dead]
- _ea1k 10mo agoI spent a little bit of time poking at Gemini to see what it thought the accident rate in an urban area like Austin would be, including unreported minor cases. It estimated 2-3/100k miles. This is still lower than the extrapolation in the article, but maybe not notably lower. We need far higher quality data than this to reach meaningful conclusions. Implying conclusions based upon this extrapolation is irresponsible.
- mmooss 10mo agoI don't understand how Gemini's fabrication has any validity. What is it based on?
- _ea1k 10mo agoIt is at least as reliable as the data in the electrek article. My point is that the data naturally has error margins that are clearly large enough to make drawing concrete conclusions impossible.
- mmooss 10mo ago> It is at least as reliable as the data in the electrek article. I don't see why you say that. > My point is that the data naturally has error margins that are clearly large enough to make drawing concrete conclusions impossible. I don't understand this one either.
- kstenerud 10mo agoThere's a lot of editorializing going on. Now that the title has been restored, hopefully things calm down a bit. Ultimately, Tesla has two problems going on here: 1. Their crash rate is 2x that of Waymo. 2. They redact a lot of key information, which complicates safety assessments of their fleet. The redactions actually hurt Tesla, because the nature of each road incident really matters: EVERY traffic incident must be reported, regardless of fault (even if it's a speeding car from the other direction that hits another vehicle which then hits the robotaxi - yes, that's actually in one of the Waymo NHTSA incident reports). When Tesla redacts the way they've been doing, it makes it very difficult to do studies like https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15389588.2025.2499887#abstract https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15389588.2025.2... which show how much safer Waymo vehicles are compared to humans WHEN IT COMES TO ACTUAL DAMAGE DONE. We can't get that quality of info from Tesla due to their redaction practices. All we can reliably glean is that Tesla vehicles are involved in 2x the incidents per mile compared to Waymo. https://ilovetesla.com/teslas-robotaxi-dilemma-navigating-crash-reports-and-safety-concerns/ https://ilovetesla.com/teslas-robotaxi-dilemma-navigating-cr...
- mmooss 10mo agoThe redactions also indicate they are hiding something and deprioritize safety below (whatever they are hiding). That is, it makes Tesla not trustworthy with something that risks life and limb.
- orwin 10mo agoIf you only count robotaxis and not all Tesla, isn't the crash rate 20X per driven mile? I remember doing the math a few months ago and finding 20, but I might be mistaken.
- perrohunter 10mo agoI'm so tired of this guy being so misleading, I used to read this blog because he had tesla news, now all he tries to do is hate on tesla
- panarky 10mo agoBetter to spell out exactly what you think is misleading than to go for the ad hominem.
- ndsipa_pomu 10mo agoHow does it make sense that Tesla are allowed to redact information about an RTC on public roads? If the information is proprietary then keep the vehicle away from public roads until they stop crashing or the info can be released in the event of a collision.
- dubeye 10mo agoone minor hospitalization in half a year, probably a sensible rollout pace.
- rsynnott 10mo agoAt this rate, are there any left?
- hnburnsy 10mo agoSearch Google news and just this week and you will see Waymo blocked a parade for 45 minutes, drove into a police crime scene in LA, and two crashed into each other blocking a third. Stuff happens, but obviously Fred rarely reports the Waymo incidents but he is quck to write about every Tesla one. https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/two-self-driving-waymos-just-191320371.html https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/two-self-driving-waymos-...