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Tesla’s autonomous vehicles are crashing at a rate much higher tha human drivers

495 points by breve 9mo ago

SilverBirch 9mo ago
To be honest I think the true story here is: > the fleet has traveled approximately 500,000 miles Let's say they average 10mph, and say they operate 10 hours a day, that's 5,000 car-days of travel, or to put it another way about 30 cars over 6 months. That's tiny! That's a robotaxi company that is literally smaller than a lot of taxi companies. One crash in this context is going to just completely blow out their statistics. So it's kind of dumb to even talk about the statistics today. The real take away is that the Robotaxis don't really exist, they're in an experimental phase and we're not going to get real statistics until they're doing 1,000x that mileage, and that won't happen until they've built something that actually works and that may never happen.
- razingeden 9mo ago
  >One crash in this context is going to just completely blow out their statistics. One crash in 500,000 miles would merely put them on par with a human driver. One crash every 50,000 miles would be more like having my sister behind the wheel. I’ll be sure to tell the next insurer that she’s not a bad driver - she’s just one person operating an itty bitty fleet consisting of one vehicle! If the cybertaxi were a human driver accruing double points 7 months into its probationary license it would have never made it to 9 accidents because it would have been revoked and suspended after the first two or three accidents in her state and then thrown in JAIL as a “scofflaw” if it continued driving.
  - jacquesm 9mo ago
    > One crash in 500,000 miles would merely put them on par with a human driver. > One crash every 50,000 miles would be more like having my sister behind the wheel. I'm not sure if that leads to the conclusion that you want it to.
    - razingeden 9mo ago
      It does. She just ran over a bus shelter, like she was vibe driving a Tesla on autopilot or something.
    - simiones 9mo ago
      From the tone, it seems that the poster's sister is a particularly bad driver (or at least they believe her to be). While having an autonomous car that can drive as well as even a bad human driver is definitely a major accomplishment technologically, we all know that threshold was passed a long time ago. However, if Tesla's robotaxis (with human monitors on board, let's not forget - these are not fully autonomous cars like Waymo's!) are at best as good as some of the worse human drivers, then they have no business being allowed on public roads. Remember that human drivers can also lose their license if [caught] driving too poorly.
      - razingeden 9mo ago
        > Remember that human drivers can also lose their license if [caught] driving too poorly. Thank you, yes, I could have said that better. But yeah as a new human driver if I’m too sloppy and get into too many incidents , the penalty is harsh and I’d say that “none of the autonomous companies are held to the same standard” but that’s not 100% true: we do have cities and states refusing to play ball or issue permits here. But that’s exactly right. my opinion was/is that there should be a probationary period for the first year of new autonomous technology — or major deviations from existing and proven technologies — too. And if it causes too many accidents or violations, then, it should be held to the same standard I am
  - martin_a 9mo ago
    [flagged]
    - burnished 9mo ago
      They might have forgotten how to share an anecdote and their sister might just be a regular awful driver
    - nsjdkdkdk 9mo ago
      [dead]
- mcherm 9mo ago
  > The real take away is that the Robotaxis don't really exist More accurately, the real takeaway is that Tesla's robo-taxis don't really exist.
  - UltraSane 9mo ago
    Because it is fraud trying to inflate Tesla stock price.
    - micromacrofoot 9mo ago
      What's even more unbelievable is that a significant number of people are still falling for it
    - awakeasleep 9mo ago
      The real term is “marketing puffery.” It’s a fun, legally specific way to describe a company bullshitting to hype its product.
      - estearum 9mo ago
        The Robotaxi service might be puffery, selling "full self driving" is just fraud.
      - UltraSane 9mo ago
        A robotaxi rollout where each car needs a safety driver is fraud.
      - vel0city 9mo ago
        Puffery is like saying this is the best canned chili ever made. Selling a can of chili but never actually giving the chili just an empty can is fraud.
      - UltraSane 9mo ago
        Puffery should really be limited to subjective things like flavor and not self-driving cars.
- marricks 9mo ago
  Wait, so your argument is there's only 9 crashes so we should wait until there's possibly 9,000 crashes to make an assessment? That's crazy dangerous. At least 3 of them sound dangerous already, and it's on Tesla to convince us they're safe. It could be a statistical anomaly so far, but hovering at 9x the alternative doesn't provide confidence.
  - SilverBirch 9mo ago
    No, my argument is you shouldn't draw a statistical conclusion with this data. That's all. I'm kind of pushing in the direction you were pointing in the second part - it's not enough data to make statistical inferences. We should examine each incident, identify the root cause and come to a conclusion as to whether that means the system is not fit for purpose. I just don't think the statistics are useful.
- amelius 9mo ago
  But deep learning is also about statistics. So if the crash statistics are insufficient, then we cannot trust the deep learning.
  - SilverBirch 9mo ago
    I suspect Tesla claims they do the deep learning on sensor data from their entire fleet of cars sold, not just the robotaxis.
- mbreese 9mo ago
  The more I think about your comment on statistics, the more I change my mind. At first, I think you’re right - these are (thankfully) rare events. And because of this, the accident rate is Poisson distributed. At this low of a rate, it’s really hard to know what the true average is, so we do really need more time/miles to know how good/bad the Teslas are performing. I also suspect they are getting safer over time, but again… more data required. But, we do have the statistical models to work with these rare events. But then I think about your comment about it only being 30 cars operating over 6 months. Which, makes sense, except for the fact that it’s not like having a fleet of individual drivers. These robotaxis should all be running the same software, so it’s statistically more like one person driving 500,000 miles. This is a lot of miles! I’ve been driving for over 30 years and I don’t think I’ve driven that many miles. This should be enough data for a comparison. If we are comparing the Tesla accident rate to people in a consistent manner (accident classification), it’s a valid comparison. So, I think the way this works out is: given an accident rate of 1/500000, we could expect a human to have 9 accidents over the same miles with a probability of ~ 1 x 10^-6. (Never do live math on the internet, but I think this is about right). Hopefully they will get better.
  - vel0city 9mo ago
    500,000 / 30 years is ~16,667mi/yr. While its a bit above the US average, its not incredibly so. Tons of normal commuters will have driven more than that many miles in 30 years.
    - mbreese 9mo ago
      That’s not quite the point. I’m a bit of an outlier, I don’t drive much daily, but make long trips fairly often. The point with focusing on 500,000 miles is that that should be enough of an observation period to be able to make some comparisons. The parent comment was making it seem like that was too low. Putting it into context of how much I’ve driven makes me think that 500,000 miles is enough to make a valid comparison.
      - vel0city 9mo ago
- outside1234 9mo ago
  No, they exist, but they are called Waymo
- culi 9mo ago
  We've known for a long time now that their "robotaxi" fleet in Austin is about 30-50 vehicles. It started off much lower and has grown to about 50 today. There's actually a community project to track individual vehicles that has more exact figures. Currently it's at 58 unique vehicles (based on license plates) with about 22 that haven't been seen in over a month https://robotaxitracker.com/ https://robotaxitracker.com/
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
artembugara 9mo ago
By the law of large numbers, it's not a significant distance.
fabian2k 9mo ago
As long as there are still safety drivers, the data doesn't really tell you if the AI is any good. Unless you had reliable data about the number of interventions by the driver, which I assume Tesla doesn't provide. Still damning that the data is so bad even then. Good data wouldn't tell us anything, the bad data likely means the AI is bad unless they were spectacularly unlucky. But since Tesla redacts all information, I'm not inclined to give them any benefit of the doubt here.
- fransje26 9mo ago
  > As long as there are still safety drivers, the data doesn't really tell you if the AI is any good. Unless you had reliable data about the number of interventions by the driver, which I assume Tesla doesn't provide. Sorry that does not compute. It tells you exactly if the AI is any good, as, despite the fact that there were safety drivers on board, 9 crashes happened. Which implies that more crashes would have happened without safety drivers. Over 500,000 miles, that's pretty bad. Unless you are willing to argue, in bad faith, that the crashes happened because of safety driver intervention..
  - fabian2k 9mo ago
    I'm a bit hesitant to draw strong conclusions here because there is so little data. I would personally assume that it means the AI isn't ready at all, but without knowing any details at all about the crashes this is hard to state for sure. But if the number of crashes had been lower than for human drivers, this would tell us nothing at all.
  - voidUpdate 9mo ago
    The problem is we don't know how many incidents would have happened if there was no safety driver. How many times did the driver have to intervene to prevent an accident? IMO, that should count towards the number of AI-driven accidents
- repelsteeltje 9mo ago
  > As long as there are still safety drivers, the data doesn't really tell you if the AI is any good. I think we're on to something. You imply that good here means the AI can do it's thing without human interference. But that's not how we view, say, LLMs being good at coding. In the first context we hope for AI to improve safety whereas in the second we merely hope to improve productivity. In both cases, a human is in the loop which results in second order complexity: the human adjusts behaviour to AI reality, which redefines what "good AI" means in an endless loop.
z7 9mo ago
The comparison isn't really like-for-like. NHTSA SGO AV reports can include very minor, low-speed contact events that would often never show up as police-reported crashes for human drivers, meaning the Tesla crash count may be drawing from a broader category than the human baseline it's being compared to. There's also a denominator problem. The mileage figure appears to be cumulative miles "as of November," while the crashes are drawn from a specific July-November window in Austin. It's not clear that those miles line up with the same geography and time period. The sample size is tiny (nine crashes), uncertainty is huge, and the analysis doesn't distinguish between at-fault and not-at-fault incidents, or between preventable and non-preventable ones. Also, the comparison to Waymo is stated without harmonizing crash definitions and reporting practices.
- xnx 9mo ago
  Tesla could share real/complete data at any time. The fact that they don't is likely and indicator the data does not look good.
  - LunicLynx 9mo ago
    You can do this with every topic. XYZ does not share this, so IT MUST BE BAD.
    - happymellon 9mo ago
      And it usually is.
      - LunicLynx 9mo ago
        [flagged]
        gpderetta 9mo ago
        happymellon is not trying to sell you a̵ ̵b̵r̵i̵d̵g̵e̵ a self driving car though.
mikkupikku 9mo ago
All these self driving and "drivers assistance" features like lane keeping exist to satisfy consumer demand for a way to multitask when driving. Tesla's is particularly cancerous, but all of them should be banned. I don't care how good you think your lane keeping in whatever car you have is, you won't need it if you keep your hands on the wheel, eyes on the road, and don't drive when drowsy. Turn it off and stop trying to delegate your responsibility for what your two ton speeding death machine does!
- fragmede 9mo ago
  We made drunk driving super illegal and that still doesn't stop people. I would rather they didn't in the first place, but since they're going to anyway, I'd really rather they have a computer that does it better than they do. FSD will pull over and stop if the driver has passed out.
  - mikkupikku 9mo ago
    If we could ensure that only drunk people use driver assistance features, I'd be all for that. The reality is that 90% of the sober public are now driving like chronic drunks because they think their car has assumed the responsibility of watching the road. Ban it ALL.
    - michaelsshaw 9mo ago
      What I'm hearing here is anecdotal and largely based on feelings. The facts are that automatic emergency braking (which should not activate under normal driving circumstances as it is highly uncomfortable) and lane-keeping are basic safety features that have objectively improved safety on the roads. Everything you've said is merely conjecture.
    - nkrisc 9mo ago
      No, remove their licenses if they can’t drive safely. Let safe and responsible drivers use these safety-enhancing features. If someone is driving dangerously despite these safety features, they should not have a license to operate a motor vehicle on public roads. These features are still valuable even to safe drivers simply because safe drivers are human and will still make mistakes.
rich_sasha 9mo ago
As much as I'd love to pile in on Tesla, it's unclear to me the severity of the incidents (I know they are listed) and if human drivers would report such things. "Rear collision while backing" could mean they tapped a bollard. Doesn't sound like a crash. A human driver might never even report this. What does "Incident at 18 mph" even mean? By my own subjective count, only three descriptions sound unambiguously bad, and only one mentions a "minor injury". I'm not saying it's great, and I can imagine Tesla being selective in publishing, but based on this I wouldn't say it seems dire. For example, roundabouts in cities (in Europe anyway) tend to increase the number of crashes, but they are overall of lower severity, leading to an overall improvement of safety. Judging by TFA alone I can't tell this isn't the case here. I can imagine a robotaxi having a different distribution of frequency and severity of accidents than a human driver.
- orwin 9mo ago
  He compared to the estimated statistics for non-reported accident (typically your example, that involve only one vehicle and only result in scratched paint) to estimate the 3x. Else the title would have been 9x (which is in line with 10x a data analyst blogger wrote ~ 3month ago). > roundabouts in cities (in Europe anyway) tend to increase the number of crashes Not in France, according to data. It depends on the speed limit, but they decrease accident by 34% overall, and almost 20% when the speed limit is 30 or 50 km/h.
  - janc_ 9mo ago
    They reduce accidents in general, but bring us some “entertaining” new ones where a (usually) drunk driver crashes into the statue/fountain/whatever in the middle or uses the little “hill” in the middle as a jump ramp…
    - simondotau 9mo ago
      As opposed to drunk drivers who treat a non-roundabout intersection as a game of Russian roulette?
- serf 9mo ago
onetokeoverthe 9mo ago
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lvl155 9mo ago
I am so tired of people defending Tesla. I’ve wrote off Tesla long time ago but what gets me are the people defending their tech. We all can go see the products and experience them. The tech needs to be at least 100x more error free vs humans. It cannot be on par with human error rate.
- flanked-evergl 9mo ago
  Cite?
- cbeach 9mo ago
  We tend to defend companies that push the frontiers of self-driving cars, because the technology has the potential to save lives and make life easier and cheaper for everyone. As engineers, we understand that the technology will go from unsafe, to par-with-humans, to safer-than-humans, but in order for it to get to the latter, it requires much validation and training in an intermediate state, with appropriate safeguards. Tesla's approach has been more risk averse and conservative than others. It has compiled data and trained its models on billions of miles of real world telemetry from its own fleet (all of which are equipped with advanced internet-connected computers). Then it has rolled out the robotaxi tech slowly and cautiously, with human safety drivers, and only in two areas. I defend Tesla's tech, because I've owned and driven a Tesla (Model S) for many years, and its ten-year-old Autopilot (autosteer and cruise control with lane shift) is actually smoother and more reliable than many of its competitors current offerings. I've also watched hours of footage of Tesla's current FSD on YouTube, and seen it evolve into something quite remarkable. I think the end-to-end neural net with human-like sensors is more sensible than other approaches, which use sensors like LIDAR as a crutch for their more rudimentary software. Unlike many commenters on this platform I have no political issues with Elon, so that doesn't colour my judgement of Tesla as a company, and its technological achievements. I wish others would set aside their partisan tribablism and recognise that Tesla has completely revolutionised the EV market and continues to make significant positive contributions to technology as a whole, all while opening all its patents and opening its Supercharger network to vehicles from competitors. Its ethics are sound.
  - 9mo ago
sammyjoe72 9mo ago
Elon promised self driving cars in 12 months back in 2017? He’s also promising Optimus robots doing surgery on humans in 3 years? Extrapolating…………… Optimus is going to kill some humans and it will all be worth it!
- SirFatty 9mo ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_predictions_for_autonomous_Tesla_vehicles_by_Elon_Musk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_predictions_for_autono...
- epolanski 9mo ago
  Elon is aware that Tesla insane market valuation would crash 10x if it stays a car company. There isn't enough money and most importantly margin in the car industry to warrant such a valuation, so he has to pivot away from cars into the next thing. Just to make an example of how risky it is to be a car company for Tesla. In 2025 Toyota has had: 3.5 times Tesla's revenue, 8 times the net income and twice the margin. And Toyota has a market cap that is 6 times lower than Tesla. It would take tesla a gargantuan effort to match Toyota's numbers and margins, and if it matched it...it would be a disaster for Tesla's stock. Hell, Tesla makes much less money than Mercedes Benz and with a smaller margin.. Mercedes has 60% more revenue and twice the net income. Yet, Tesla is valued around 40 times Mercedes-Benz. Tesla *must* pivot away from cars and make it a side business or sooner or later that stuff is crashing, and it will crash fast and hard. Musk understands that, which is why he focusing on robo taxis and robots. It's the only way to sell Tesla to naive investors.
  - kakacik 9mo ago
    > Elon is aware that Tesla insane market valuation would crash 10x if it stays a car company. I see nothing wrong here, correction back to reality. I understand why people adored him blindly in the early days, but liking him now after its clear what sort of person he is and always will be is same as liking trump. Many people still do it, but its hardly a defensible position unless on is already invested in his empire.
viraptor 9mo ago
> showing cumulative robotaxi miles, the fleet has traveled approximately 500,000 miles as of November 2025. Comparing stats from this many miles to just over 1 trillion miles driven collectively in the US in a similar time period is a bad idea. Any noise in Tesla's data will change the ratio a lot. You can already see it from the monthly numbers varying between 1 and 4. This is a bad comparison with not enough data. Like my household average for the number of teeth per person is ~25% higher than world average! (Includes one baby) Edit: feel free to actually respond to the claim rather than downvote
- dchftcs 9mo ago
  I think what you say would have be fair if Elon's and his fanboys' stance was "we need more data" rather than "we will be able to scale self-driving cars very quickly, very soon".
- tpm 9mo ago
  It's always possible to deny the relevancy of a comparison based on some quality of the compared data. The autonomous car pilot trials will be by their very nature restriced to some locations, with specific weather patterns, etc., so even after the mileage will be 1000x of the current one there will be still options. At which point will the comparison be considered relevant?
  - viraptor 9mo ago
    When the confidence interval is narrow enough. For the human events in 1 trillion, we get 95% interval around [1997229, 2002773]. That barely changes the observed ratio. For 9 events of Tesla robotaxis, we get [4.11537, 17.08480]. That means "the real ratio is maybe half, maybe twice the measured one - we can't tell". The September was so out of usual distribution, that if you checked just October and November, Tesla would have a much better rate than humans. I'm not saying the relevant agencies shouldn't be checking every crash. Just that "Tesla’s own Robotaxi data confirms crash rate 3x worse than humans even with monitor" is completely unjustified. But "crash at rate maybe the same as human and maybe 18x - we're 99% sure" doesn't get clicks.
_ph_ 9mo ago
As far as I understand, those Robotaxis are only available within Austin so far. That is slow city traffic, the number of miles per ride is very small. However the number for human drivers seem to take all kind of roads into respect. Of course, highways are the roads where you drive most of the distance at the least risk for an accident. Has this been taken into account for the evaluation? It would be ironic that people are claiming the Tesla numbers for Autopilot are to optimistic, as it is used on highways only and at the same time don't notice that city-only numbers for the FSD would be pessimistic statistics-wise.
- raincole 9mo ago
  It does look extremely pessimistic. Like one of the 'incident' is that they hit a curb at a parking lot at 6 MPH. No human driver would report this kind of incident. A human driver would probably forget it after the next traffic light. While it's clearly Tesla's fault (if you hit any static object it's your fault), when you take this kind of 'incident' into account of course it'd look worse than humans.
  - tsimionescu 9mo ago
    The human data estimate they compare to to get the 3x number also includes this type of incident - even if of course no one reports it, you can get some idea of the number of such incidents based on service and paint shop data.
- janc_ 9mo ago
  More importantly: it seems like Austin is mostly a typical US city grid of wide streets. Nothing comparable with an average old inner city, or narrow countryside roads with a ditch or cliff or quay on one or both sides. Probably not many pedestrians & cyclists roaming the streets either?
ProfessorZoom 9mo ago
[flagged]
ryandvm 9mo ago
Tesla has completely fumbled a spectacular lead in EVs and managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. And instead of turning it around, we're supposed to believe they are going to completely pivot and then take over a market with far more developed competitors (e.g. Boston Dynamics). That Elon is riding this wave amidst the transparency of the whole thing is the funniest part. It's like watching people lose money at the "three cup" game but the cups are clear.
- bevekspldnw 9mo ago
  …and the guy shuffling the cups is Dave Chappell’s crackhead character. My theory has always been Trumps grand con was acting like what poor people thought a rich person was like, Elon acts like what morons think a genius is like.
- SJMG 9mo ago
  I'm not sure how defensible the lead was. The only reason BYD isn't the only game in town is tariffs. The pivot to Optimus is ridiculous though. They can't get a car to drive truly autonomously after more than a decade and they want to expand the degrees of freedom?
  - eloisant 9mo ago
    Tesla had a good brand image in the early 2010, they could have positioned themselves like the quality/luxury brand for EV and have people buy Tesla for the brand itself like people do for Apple. Instead they let Elon made their brand so toxic people are actively avoiding it.
    - ghaff 9mo ago
      I'm skeptical. If someone really wants a Tesla, my guess is that they'll rationalize Musk's actions or least compartmentalize them.
      - sejje 9mo ago
        I think Facebook is even more universally thought of as a bad company, and everyone still engages there, too.
Markaplan 9mo ago
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heisenbit 9mo ago
Elon know FSD still takes time and that is the reason he is now ramping up the robot production. Who else to turn to to steer is upcoming fleet of taxies?
stevage 9mo ago
Hard to believe that in 2017, I was utterly convinced that self-driving cars would be the majority of all cars on the road within 5 years.
- ghaff 9mo ago
  - There was a lot of hype - A lot of people fervently hoped they wouldn't need to drive for much longer and their kids wouldn't even need to learn - So much progress had been made with deep learning is a fairly short length of time that surely we were on the cusp of broadly deployed autonomous vehicles.
giorgioz 9mo ago
Yes on one side Tesla is not transparent but on the other side the author of the article is an hypocrite given they went with the click-bait title "Tesla’s own Robotaxi data confirms crash rate 3x worse than humans even with monitor" Tesla secrecy is likely due to avoid journalists taking any chance they can to sell more news by writing an autonomous vehicles horror story. Given the secrecy we don't know what happened, yet the journalist did choose to go with the worse scenario title.
- jjav 9mo ago
  > Tesla secrecy is likely due to avoid journalists taking any chance they can to sell more news by writing an autonomous vehicles horror story That would mean their secret data, if published, supports writing horror stories about it. OTOH if the data turned out to show spectacularly safe operations, that would shut off any possible negative articles. Of all people, how likely is it that Musk is intentionally avoiding good publicity by keeping a lot of data secret?
- tsimionescu 9mo ago
  While the title is slightly biased, it's completely fair to analyze all of the public data a company provides about a very public problem (how safe their autonomous cars are), and show what the risks are. If Tesla wants us to believe their robotaxis are safe (which they implicitly do by putting these on public roads), it's entirely on them to publish data that supports that claim. If the data they themselves publish suggests that they are much worse than human drivers, then I want journalists to report on that. It's also extremely implausible that Tesla has data that their cars are very safe, but choose to instead publish vague data that makes them seem much worse. It's for example much more likely that these 9 incidents reported are just the bad incidents that they think they won't be able to hide, rather than assuming these are all or mostly minor incidents like lightly bumping into a static object.
- nemomarx 9mo ago
  Secrecy clearly doesn't avoid that kind of story though. The question is if their numbers were really good, or at least as good as Waymo, why wouldn't they share them for the positive press? Waymo doesn't get as many negative pieces like this. It's a pretty logical conclusion to say that numbers they won't share must make them look bad in some way.
ModernMech 9mo ago
Of course, it could be no other way for a company that unleashed "FSD Beta" onto the streets and allowed all of us to be subjected to their bloody (literally) beta test. You don't get a safer future with "move fast and break things" mentality. Especially when the CEO is as illiterate as Musk about his own technology that he discount the results of actual experts in the field. I mean, just look at the trail of headless corpses (there actually are multiple) left by Tesla during this beta test. Weren't we all here to witness a previous version of the thing running straight through a cartoon wall? Of course this thing was always going to end in disappointment -- it's sucked its whole existence. It's never been serious it's always been an 80/20 play hoping to get away with the con without delivering the rest of the 20% that makes it work. Tesla's technology is bunk, their entire FSD thesis of "vision only" has been a dismal failure, and it's actually going to tank the entire Tesla car brand. I've been saying this for a while and it looks like it's finally starting to happen: Tesla is going to exit the car business never having delivered FSD in any viable capacity (although they'll claim total success), and Musk will retarget his empire to running the same FSD grift but with robots. Musk learned the bigger the promise, the more runway people give you to make it a reality. Spin a big enough yarn and Musk can live the rest of his life delivering nothing -- not Mars, not FSD, not AI, nada -- and people will still call him a genius.
- simondotau 9mo ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8564Ne3kai0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8564Ne3kai0
spprashant 9mo ago
Most of us are very well aware of Tesla's shortcomings with FSD and inflated valuations. But electrek's reporting is biased and in bad faith when it comes to Tesla/Musk.
- culi 9mo ago
  A recent iSeeCars study that found that Tesla as a brand had the highest fatal crash rate in the US https://www.iseecars.com/most-dangerous-cars-study#:~:text=The%20Most%20Dangerous%20Car%20Brands https://www.iseecars.com/most-dangerous-cars-study#:~:text=T...
smoovb 9mo ago
electrek.co recent Tesla headline summary with sentiment: (negative) Tesla to stop selling Full Self-Driving package, moves to subscription-only (negative) Elon Musk says Tesla 'almost done' with AI5 design, 6 months after saying it was 'finished' (negative) Tesla's full 2025 data from Europe is in, and it is a total bloodbath (neutral) Tesla updates 2026 Model Y with new features, launches tiny third row in the US (positive) Tesla launches US-made solar panel, a rare sign of life for its solar business (negative) Elon Musk moves goalpost again: admits Tesla needs 10 billion miles for 'safe unsupervised' FSD (negative) Are Tesla Gigafactory Berlin's days numbered? (negative) Elon Musk shows total ignorance of Tesla's current falling sales trajectory (negative) Tesla rolls out 0% financing to boost declining sales (negative) Tesla (TSLA) releases Q4 delivery results: confirms decline in sales is accelerating (negative) Tesla Cybercabs spotted testing, unsurprisingly with steering wheels (negative) Elon Musk's top 5 Tesla predictions for 2025 that didn't happen (negative) Tesla (TSLA) does something unusual ahead of Q4 delivery results (negative) Elon Musk drops 'sustainable' from Tesla's mission (negative) Tesla's Robotaxi project in Austin is much smaller than Musk claims (neutral) Tesla Robotaxi spotted without a safety driver in Austin; Musk confirms testing begins (negative) Tesla US sales drop to under 40,000 units following tax credit expiration (neutral) Tesla CEO Elon Musk claims driverless Robotaxis coming to Austin in 3 weeks (positive) Tesla announces 2025 holiday update with a few cool features (negative) Tesla (TSLA) sales keep crashing in Europe with a single market temporarily saving it
- flakeoil 9mo ago
  But is that electrec's or Tesla's fault?
culi 9mo ago
This comes after a recent iSeeCars study that found that Tesla as a brand had the highest fatal crash rate in the US (with Kia being a very close second) https://www.iseecars.com/most-dangerous-cars-study#:~:text=The%20Most%20Dangerous%20Car%20Brands https://www.iseecars.com/most-dangerous-cars-study#:~:text=T...
_ea1k 9mo ago
TBH, the comments here amaze me. The claim is that a human being paid to monitor a driver assistance feature is 3x more likely to crash than a human alone. That needs extraordinary evidence. Instead the evidence is misleading guesses.
- estearum 9mo ago
  That... is not really an extraordinary claim. That has been many people's null hypothesis since before this technology was even deployed, and the rationale for it is sufficiently borne out to play a role in vigilance systems across nearly every other industry that relies on automation. A safety system with blurry performance boundaries is called "a massive risk." That's why responsible system designers first define their ODD, then design their system to perform to a pre-specified standard within that ODD. Tesla's technology is "works mostly pretty well in many but not all scenarios and we can't tell you which is which" It is not an extraordinary claim at all that such a system could yield worse outcomes than a human with no asssistance.
- overfeed 9mo ago
  > That needs extraordinary evidence. Waymo studied this back when it was a Google moonshot, and concluded that going full automation is safer than human supervision. A driving system that mostly works lulls the driver into complacency. Besides automation failure, driver complacency was a big component[1] of the fatal accident that led to the shuttering of Ubers self-driving efforts - the safety driver was looking at her phone for minutes in the lead up. It is also the reason why driver attention is monitored in L2
  - pardon_me 9mo ago
    If rider and pedestrian safety is the main concern, the automated assistance and safety systems that car manufacturers were already developing make the most sense. They either warn or intervene in situations the human may not realize they are in danger and/or do not respond in time. Developing these solves the harder problems first, automation is easy in comparison. The idea that mostly-automating the system because it's statistically better than humans, but requiring human-assistance to monitor and respond in these exact situations, was flawed logic to begin with. Comparisons of statistics should be made like-for-like, given these are scenarios we can easily control. For example, a robotic taxis should at least be compared to professional drivers on similar routes, roads, vehicles, and times of day. Not just comparing "all drivers in all vehicles in all scenarios over time" with private company data that cherry-picks "automated driving" miles on highways etc. (where existing assistance systems could already achieve near-perfect results). Companies testing autonomy on the public should be forced to upload all crash data to investigators as part of their licensing. The vehicles already have extremely detailed sensor and video data to operate. The fact that we have no verified data to compare to existing human statistics is damning. It's a farce.
OfflineSergio 9mo ago
this is not good but the point is this can be improved much easier than improving human accidents rate. Both are very difficult problems, but one is certainly harder.
- tsimionescu 9mo ago
  That's not really true. There are huge discrepancies in human human driver accident data across different countries, which shows that there are clear practices one could deploy to significantly reduce driving incidents - people just choose to not implement them.
4fterd4rk 9mo ago
The human accident count per mile is brought down by a lot of highway miles. The Robotaxi is, at present, geofenced. It's not going to be getting a lot of highway miles. Most crashes happen on city streets.
mejthemage 9mo ago
Humans average one police reported accident per 500,000 miles?! TIL I'm incredibly unlucky.
- DeathMetal3000 9mo ago
  You’re just a bad driver;)
- simondotau 9mo ago
  You're not. All you need to do is look around a typical car park and count witness marks on car bumpers to know that accidents are extremely common. One study put the estimate at one "driving mistake" every 500 miles and one crash every 60,000 miles. An insurance policy study estimates that the average person is involved in 3–4 collisions in their lifetime.
oleumbudget 9mo ago
Wow thats interesting to know and is quite concerning
93po 9mo ago
I really wish we'd ban electrek articles on HN, they're constantly false, misleading, or just grinding an axe.
moorebob 9mo ago
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fatheranton 9mo ago
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timzaman 9mo ago
Author (fred lambert) is a tesla shorter, and a total asshole. Didnt see that disclaimer on his website.

495 points by breve 9mo ago

To be honest I think the true story here is: > the fleet has traveled approximately 500,000 miles Let's say they average 10mph, and say they operate 10 hours a day, that's 5,000 car-days of travel, or to put it another way about 30 cars over 6 months. That's tiny! That's a robotaxi company that is literally smaller than a lot of taxi companies. One crash in this context is going to just completely blow out their statistics. So it's kind of dumb to even talk about the statistics today. The real take away is that the Robotaxis don't really exist, they're in an experimental phase and we're not going to get real statistics until they're doing 1,000x that mileage, and that won't happen until they've built something that actually works and that may never happen.

razingeden 9mo ago
>One crash in this context is going to just completely blow out their statistics. One crash in 500,000 miles would merely put them on par with a human driver. One crash every 50,000 miles would be more like having my sister behind the wheel. I’ll be sure to tell the next insurer that she’s not a bad driver - she’s just one person operating an itty bitty fleet consisting of one vehicle! If the cybertaxi were a human driver accruing double points 7 months into its probationary license it would have never made it to 9 accidents because it would have been revoked and suspended after the first two or three accidents in her state and then thrown in JAIL as a “scofflaw” if it continued driving.
- jacquesm 9mo ago
  > One crash in 500,000 miles would merely put them on par with a human driver. > One crash every 50,000 miles would be more like having my sister behind the wheel. I'm not sure if that leads to the conclusion that you want it to.
  - razingeden 9mo ago
    It does. She just ran over a bus shelter, like she was vibe driving a Tesla on autopilot or something.
  - simiones 9mo ago
    From the tone, it seems that the poster's sister is a particularly bad driver (or at least they believe her to be). While having an autonomous car that can drive as well as even a bad human driver is definitely a major accomplishment technologically, we all know that threshold was passed a long time ago. However, if Tesla's robotaxis (with human monitors on board, let's not forget - these are not fully autonomous cars like Waymo's!) are at best as good as some of the worse human drivers, then they have no business being allowed on public roads. Remember that human drivers can also lose their license if [caught] driving too poorly.
    - razingeden 9mo ago
      > Remember that human drivers can also lose their license if [caught] driving too poorly. Thank you, yes, I could have said that better. But yeah as a new human driver if I’m too sloppy and get into too many incidents , the penalty is harsh and I’d say that “none of the autonomous companies are held to the same standard” but that’s not 100% true: we do have cities and states refusing to play ball or issue permits here. But that’s exactly right. my opinion was/is that there should be a probationary period for the first year of new autonomous technology — or major deviations from existing and proven technologies — too. And if it causes too many accidents or violations, then, it should be held to the same standard I am
- martin_a 9mo ago
  [flagged]
  - burnished 9mo ago
    They might have forgotten how to share an anecdote and their sister might just be a regular awful driver
  - nsjdkdkdk 9mo ago
    [dead]
mcherm 9mo ago
> The real take away is that the Robotaxis don't really exist More accurately, the real takeaway is that Tesla's robo-taxis don't really exist.
- UltraSane 9mo ago
  Because it is fraud trying to inflate Tesla stock price.
  - micromacrofoot 9mo ago
    What's even more unbelievable is that a significant number of people are still falling for it
  - awakeasleep 9mo ago
    The real term is “marketing puffery.” It’s a fun, legally specific way to describe a company bullshitting to hype its product.
    - estearum 9mo ago
      The Robotaxi service might be puffery, selling "full self driving" is just fraud.
    - UltraSane 9mo ago
      A robotaxi rollout where each car needs a safety driver is fraud.
    - vel0city 9mo ago
      Puffery is like saying this is the best canned chili ever made. Selling a can of chili but never actually giving the chili just an empty can is fraud.
    - UltraSane 9mo ago
      Puffery should really be limited to subjective things like flavor and not self-driving cars.
marricks 9mo ago
Wait, so your argument is there's only 9 crashes so we should wait until there's possibly 9,000 crashes to make an assessment? That's crazy dangerous. At least 3 of them sound dangerous already, and it's on Tesla to convince us they're safe. It could be a statistical anomaly so far, but hovering at 9x the alternative doesn't provide confidence.
- SilverBirch 9mo ago
  No, my argument is you shouldn't draw a statistical conclusion with this data. That's all. I'm kind of pushing in the direction you were pointing in the second part - it's not enough data to make statistical inferences. We should examine each incident, identify the root cause and come to a conclusion as to whether that means the system is not fit for purpose. I just don't think the statistics are useful.
amelius 9mo ago
But deep learning is also about statistics. So if the crash statistics are insufficient, then we cannot trust the deep learning.
- SilverBirch 9mo ago
  I suspect Tesla claims they do the deep learning on sensor data from their entire fleet of cars sold, not just the robotaxis.
mbreese 9mo ago
The more I think about your comment on statistics, the more I change my mind. At first, I think you’re right - these are (thankfully) rare events. And because of this, the accident rate is Poisson distributed. At this low of a rate, it’s really hard to know what the true average is, so we do really need more time/miles to know how good/bad the Teslas are performing. I also suspect they are getting safer over time, but again… more data required. But, we do have the statistical models to work with these rare events. But then I think about your comment about it only being 30 cars operating over 6 months. Which, makes sense, except for the fact that it’s not like having a fleet of individual drivers. These robotaxis should all be running the same software, so it’s statistically more like one person driving 500,000 miles. This is a lot of miles! I’ve been driving for over 30 years and I don’t think I’ve driven that many miles. This should be enough data for a comparison. If we are comparing the Tesla accident rate to people in a consistent manner (accident classification), it’s a valid comparison. So, I think the way this works out is: given an accident rate of 1/500000, we could expect a human to have 9 accidents over the same miles with a probability of ~ 1 x 10^-6. (Never do live math on the internet, but I think this is about right). Hopefully they will get better.
- vel0city 9mo ago
  500,000 / 30 years is ~16,667mi/yr. While its a bit above the US average, its not incredibly so. Tons of normal commuters will have driven more than that many miles in 30 years.
  - mbreese 9mo ago
    That’s not quite the point. I’m a bit of an outlier, I don’t drive much daily, but make long trips fairly often. The point with focusing on 500,000 miles is that that should be enough of an observation period to be able to make some comparisons. The parent comment was making it seem like that was too low. Putting it into context of how much I’ve driven makes me think that 500,000 miles is enough to make a valid comparison.
    - vel0city 9mo ago
outside1234 9mo ago
No, they exist, but they are called Waymo
culi 9mo ago
We've known for a long time now that their "robotaxi" fleet in Austin is about 30-50 vehicles. It started off much lower and has grown to about 50 today. There's actually a community project to track individual vehicles that has more exact figures. Currently it's at 58 unique vehicles (based on license plates) with about 22 that haven't been seen in over a month https://robotaxitracker.com/ https://robotaxitracker.com/

deleted 9mo ago

[deleted]

artembugara 9mo ago

By the law of large numbers, it's not a significant distance.

fabian2k 9mo ago

As long as there are still safety drivers, the data doesn't really tell you if the AI is any good. Unless you had reliable data about the number of interventions by the driver, which I assume Tesla doesn't provide. Still damning that the data is so bad even then. Good data wouldn't tell us anything, the bad data likely means the AI is bad unless they were spectacularly unlucky. But since Tesla redacts all information, I'm not inclined to give them any benefit of the doubt here.

fransje26 9mo ago
> As long as there are still safety drivers, the data doesn't really tell you if the AI is any good. Unless you had reliable data about the number of interventions by the driver, which I assume Tesla doesn't provide. Sorry that does not compute. It tells you exactly if the AI is any good, as, despite the fact that there were safety drivers on board, 9 crashes happened. Which implies that more crashes would have happened without safety drivers. Over 500,000 miles, that's pretty bad. Unless you are willing to argue, in bad faith, that the crashes happened because of safety driver intervention..
- fabian2k 9mo ago
  I'm a bit hesitant to draw strong conclusions here because there is so little data. I would personally assume that it means the AI isn't ready at all, but without knowing any details at all about the crashes this is hard to state for sure. But if the number of crashes had been lower than for human drivers, this would tell us nothing at all.
- voidUpdate 9mo ago
  The problem is we don't know how many incidents would have happened if there was no safety driver. How many times did the driver have to intervene to prevent an accident? IMO, that should count towards the number of AI-driven accidents
repelsteeltje 9mo ago
> As long as there are still safety drivers, the data doesn't really tell you if the AI is any good. I think we're on to something. You imply that good here means the AI can do it's thing without human interference. But that's not how we view, say, LLMs being good at coding. In the first context we hope for AI to improve safety whereas in the second we merely hope to improve productivity. In both cases, a human is in the loop which results in second order complexity: the human adjusts behaviour to AI reality, which redefines what "good AI" means in an endless loop.

z7 9mo ago

The comparison isn't really like-for-like. NHTSA SGO AV reports can include very minor, low-speed contact events that would often never show up as police-reported crashes for human drivers, meaning the Tesla crash count may be drawing from a broader category than the human baseline it's being compared to. There's also a denominator problem. The mileage figure appears to be cumulative miles "as of November," while the crashes are drawn from a specific July-November window in Austin. It's not clear that those miles line up with the same geography and time period. The sample size is tiny (nine crashes), uncertainty is huge, and the analysis doesn't distinguish between at-fault and not-at-fault incidents, or between preventable and non-preventable ones. Also, the comparison to Waymo is stated without harmonizing crash definitions and reporting practices.

xnx 9mo ago
Tesla could share real/complete data at any time. The fact that they don't is likely and indicator the data does not look good.
- LunicLynx 9mo ago
  You can do this with every topic. XYZ does not share this, so IT MUST BE BAD.
  - happymellon 9mo ago
    And it usually is.
    - LunicLynx 9mo ago
      [flagged]
      - gpderetta 9mo ago
        happymellon is not trying to sell you a̵ ̵b̵r̵i̵d̵g̵e̵ a self driving car though.

mikkupikku 9mo ago

All these self driving and "drivers assistance" features like lane keeping exist to satisfy consumer demand for a way to multitask when driving. Tesla's is particularly cancerous, but all of them should be banned. I don't care how good you think your lane keeping in whatever car you have is, you won't need it if you keep your hands on the wheel, eyes on the road, and don't drive when drowsy. Turn it off and stop trying to delegate your responsibility for what your two ton speeding death machine does!

fragmede 9mo ago
We made drunk driving super illegal and that still doesn't stop people. I would rather they didn't in the first place, but since they're going to anyway, I'd really rather they have a computer that does it better than they do. FSD will pull over and stop if the driver has passed out.
- mikkupikku 9mo ago
  If we could ensure that only drunk people use driver assistance features, I'd be all for that. The reality is that 90% of the sober public are now driving like chronic drunks because they think their car has assumed the responsibility of watching the road. Ban it ALL.
  - michaelsshaw 9mo ago
    What I'm hearing here is anecdotal and largely based on feelings. The facts are that automatic emergency braking (which should not activate under normal driving circumstances as it is highly uncomfortable) and lane-keeping are basic safety features that have objectively improved safety on the roads. Everything you've said is merely conjecture.
  - nkrisc 9mo ago
    No, remove their licenses if they can’t drive safely. Let safe and responsible drivers use these safety-enhancing features. If someone is driving dangerously despite these safety features, they should not have a license to operate a motor vehicle on public roads. These features are still valuable even to safe drivers simply because safe drivers are human and will still make mistakes.

rich_sasha 9mo ago

As much as I'd love to pile in on Tesla, it's unclear to me the severity of the incidents (I know they are listed) and if human drivers would report such things. "Rear collision while backing" could mean they tapped a bollard. Doesn't sound like a crash. A human driver might never even report this. What does "Incident at 18 mph" even mean? By my own subjective count, only three descriptions sound unambiguously bad, and only one mentions a "minor injury". I'm not saying it's great, and I can imagine Tesla being selective in publishing, but based on this I wouldn't say it seems dire. For example, roundabouts in cities (in Europe anyway) tend to increase the number of crashes, but they are overall of lower severity, leading to an overall improvement of safety. Judging by TFA alone I can't tell this isn't the case here. I can imagine a robotaxi having a different distribution of frequency and severity of accidents than a human driver.

orwin 9mo ago
He compared to the estimated statistics for non-reported accident (typically your example, that involve only one vehicle and only result in scratched paint) to estimate the 3x. Else the title would have been 9x (which is in line with 10x a data analyst blogger wrote ~ 3month ago). > roundabouts in cities (in Europe anyway) tend to increase the number of crashes Not in France, according to data. It depends on the speed limit, but they decrease accident by 34% overall, and almost 20% when the speed limit is 30 or 50 km/h.
- janc_ 9mo ago
  They reduce accidents in general, but bring us some “entertaining” new ones where a (usually) drunk driver crashes into the statue/fountain/whatever in the middle or uses the little “hill” in the middle as a jump ramp…
  - simondotau 9mo ago
    As opposed to drunk drivers who treat a non-roundabout intersection as a game of Russian roulette?
serf 9mo ago

onetokeoverthe 9mo ago

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lvl155 9mo ago

I am so tired of people defending Tesla. I’ve wrote off Tesla long time ago but what gets me are the people defending their tech. We all can go see the products and experience them. The tech needs to be at least 100x more error free vs humans. It cannot be on par with human error rate.

flanked-evergl 9mo ago
Cite?
cbeach 9mo ago
We tend to defend companies that push the frontiers of self-driving cars, because the technology has the potential to save lives and make life easier and cheaper for everyone. As engineers, we understand that the technology will go from unsafe, to par-with-humans, to safer-than-humans, but in order for it to get to the latter, it requires much validation and training in an intermediate state, with appropriate safeguards. Tesla's approach has been more risk averse and conservative than others. It has compiled data and trained its models on billions of miles of real world telemetry from its own fleet (all of which are equipped with advanced internet-connected computers). Then it has rolled out the robotaxi tech slowly and cautiously, with human safety drivers, and only in two areas. I defend Tesla's tech, because I've owned and driven a Tesla (Model S) for many years, and its ten-year-old Autopilot (autosteer and cruise control with lane shift) is actually smoother and more reliable than many of its competitors current offerings. I've also watched hours of footage of Tesla's current FSD on YouTube, and seen it evolve into something quite remarkable. I think the end-to-end neural net with human-like sensors is more sensible than other approaches, which use sensors like LIDAR as a crutch for their more rudimentary software. Unlike many commenters on this platform I have no political issues with Elon, so that doesn't colour my judgement of Tesla as a company, and its technological achievements. I wish others would set aside their partisan tribablism and recognise that Tesla has completely revolutionised the EV market and continues to make significant positive contributions to technology as a whole, all while opening all its patents and opening its Supercharger network to vehicles from competitors. Its ethics are sound.
- 9mo ago

sammyjoe72 9mo ago

Elon promised self driving cars in 12 months back in 2017? He’s also promising Optimus robots doing surgery on humans in 3 years? Extrapolating…………… Optimus is going to kill some humans and it will all be worth it!

SirFatty 9mo ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_predictions_for_autonomous_Tesla_vehicles_by_Elon_Musk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_predictions_for_autono...
epolanski 9mo ago
Elon is aware that Tesla insane market valuation would crash 10x if it stays a car company. There isn't enough money and most importantly margin in the car industry to warrant such a valuation, so he has to pivot away from cars into the next thing. Just to make an example of how risky it is to be a car company for Tesla. In 2025 Toyota has had: 3.5 times Tesla's revenue, 8 times the net income and twice the margin. And Toyota has a market cap that is 6 times lower than Tesla. It would take tesla a gargantuan effort to match Toyota's numbers and margins, and if it matched it...it would be a disaster for Tesla's stock. Hell, Tesla makes much less money than Mercedes Benz and with a smaller margin.. Mercedes has 60% more revenue and twice the net income. Yet, Tesla is valued around 40 times Mercedes-Benz. Tesla *must* pivot away from cars and make it a side business or sooner or later that stuff is crashing, and it will crash fast and hard. Musk understands that, which is why he focusing on robo taxis and robots. It's the only way to sell Tesla to naive investors.
- kakacik 9mo ago
  > Elon is aware that Tesla insane market valuation would crash 10x if it stays a car company. I see nothing wrong here, correction back to reality. I understand why people adored him blindly in the early days, but liking him now after its clear what sort of person he is and always will be is same as liking trump. Many people still do it, but its hardly a defensible position unless on is already invested in his empire.

viraptor 9mo ago

> showing cumulative robotaxi miles, the fleet has traveled approximately 500,000 miles as of November 2025. Comparing stats from this many miles to just over 1 trillion miles driven collectively in the US in a similar time period is a bad idea. Any noise in Tesla's data will change the ratio a lot. You can already see it from the monthly numbers varying between 1 and 4. This is a bad comparison with not enough data. Like my household average for the number of teeth per person is ~25% higher than world average! (Includes one baby) Edit: feel free to actually respond to the claim rather than downvote

dchftcs 9mo ago
I think what you say would have be fair if Elon's and his fanboys' stance was "we need more data" rather than "we will be able to scale self-driving cars very quickly, very soon".
tpm 9mo ago
It's always possible to deny the relevancy of a comparison based on some quality of the compared data. The autonomous car pilot trials will be by their very nature restriced to some locations, with specific weather patterns, etc., so even after the mileage will be 1000x of the current one there will be still options. At which point will the comparison be considered relevant?
- viraptor 9mo ago
  When the confidence interval is narrow enough. For the human events in 1 trillion, we get 95% interval around [1997229, 2002773]. That barely changes the observed ratio. For 9 events of Tesla robotaxis, we get [4.11537, 17.08480]. That means "the real ratio is maybe half, maybe twice the measured one - we can't tell". The September was so out of usual distribution, that if you checked just October and November, Tesla would have a much better rate than humans. I'm not saying the relevant agencies shouldn't be checking every crash. Just that "Tesla’s own Robotaxi data confirms crash rate 3x worse than humans even with monitor" is completely unjustified. But "crash at rate maybe the same as human and maybe 18x - we're 99% sure" doesn't get clicks.

_ph_ 9mo ago

As far as I understand, those Robotaxis are only available within Austin so far. That is slow city traffic, the number of miles per ride is very small. However the number for human drivers seem to take all kind of roads into respect. Of course, highways are the roads where you drive most of the distance at the least risk for an accident. Has this been taken into account for the evaluation? It would be ironic that people are claiming the Tesla numbers for Autopilot are to optimistic, as it is used on highways only and at the same time don't notice that city-only numbers for the FSD would be pessimistic statistics-wise.

raincole 9mo ago
It does look extremely pessimistic. Like one of the 'incident' is that they hit a curb at a parking lot at 6 MPH. No human driver would report this kind of incident. A human driver would probably forget it after the next traffic light. While it's clearly Tesla's fault (if you hit any static object it's your fault), when you take this kind of 'incident' into account of course it'd look worse than humans.
- tsimionescu 9mo ago
  The human data estimate they compare to to get the 3x number also includes this type of incident - even if of course no one reports it, you can get some idea of the number of such incidents based on service and paint shop data.
janc_ 9mo ago
More importantly: it seems like Austin is mostly a typical US city grid of wide streets. Nothing comparable with an average old inner city, or narrow countryside roads with a ditch or cliff or quay on one or both sides. Probably not many pedestrians & cyclists roaming the streets either?

ProfessorZoom 9mo ago

[flagged]

ryandvm 9mo ago

Tesla has completely fumbled a spectacular lead in EVs and managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. And instead of turning it around, we're supposed to believe they are going to completely pivot and then take over a market with far more developed competitors (e.g. Boston Dynamics). That Elon is riding this wave amidst the transparency of the whole thing is the funniest part. It's like watching people lose money at the "three cup" game but the cups are clear.

bevekspldnw 9mo ago
…and the guy shuffling the cups is Dave Chappell’s crackhead character. My theory has always been Trumps grand con was acting like what poor people thought a rich person was like, Elon acts like what morons think a genius is like.
SJMG 9mo ago
I'm not sure how defensible the lead was. The only reason BYD isn't the only game in town is tariffs. The pivot to Optimus is ridiculous though. They can't get a car to drive truly autonomously after more than a decade and they want to expand the degrees of freedom?
- eloisant 9mo ago
  Tesla had a good brand image in the early 2010, they could have positioned themselves like the quality/luxury brand for EV and have people buy Tesla for the brand itself like people do for Apple. Instead they let Elon made their brand so toxic people are actively avoiding it.
  - ghaff 9mo ago
    I'm skeptical. If someone really wants a Tesla, my guess is that they'll rationalize Musk's actions or least compartmentalize them.
    - sejje 9mo ago
      I think Facebook is even more universally thought of as a bad company, and everyone still engages there, too.

Markaplan 9mo ago

[dead]

heisenbit 9mo ago

Elon know FSD still takes time and that is the reason he is now ramping up the robot production. Who else to turn to to steer is upcoming fleet of taxies?

stevage 9mo ago

Hard to believe that in 2017, I was utterly convinced that self-driving cars would be the majority of all cars on the road within 5 years.

ghaff 9mo ago
- There was a lot of hype - A lot of people fervently hoped they wouldn't need to drive for much longer and their kids wouldn't even need to learn - So much progress had been made with deep learning is a fairly short length of time that surely we were on the cusp of broadly deployed autonomous vehicles.

giorgioz 9mo ago

Yes on one side Tesla is not transparent but on the other side the author of the article is an hypocrite given they went with the click-bait title "Tesla’s own Robotaxi data confirms crash rate 3x worse than humans even with monitor" Tesla secrecy is likely due to avoid journalists taking any chance they can to sell more news by writing an autonomous vehicles horror story. Given the secrecy we don't know what happened, yet the journalist did choose to go with the worse scenario title.

jjav 9mo ago
> Tesla secrecy is likely due to avoid journalists taking any chance they can to sell more news by writing an autonomous vehicles horror story That would mean their secret data, if published, supports writing horror stories about it. OTOH if the data turned out to show spectacularly safe operations, that would shut off any possible negative articles. Of all people, how likely is it that Musk is intentionally avoiding good publicity by keeping a lot of data secret?
tsimionescu 9mo ago
While the title is slightly biased, it's completely fair to analyze all of the public data a company provides about a very public problem (how safe their autonomous cars are), and show what the risks are. If Tesla wants us to believe their robotaxis are safe (which they implicitly do by putting these on public roads), it's entirely on them to publish data that supports that claim. If the data they themselves publish suggests that they are much worse than human drivers, then I want journalists to report on that. It's also extremely implausible that Tesla has data that their cars are very safe, but choose to instead publish vague data that makes them seem much worse. It's for example much more likely that these 9 incidents reported are just the bad incidents that they think they won't be able to hide, rather than assuming these are all or mostly minor incidents like lightly bumping into a static object.
nemomarx 9mo ago
Secrecy clearly doesn't avoid that kind of story though. The question is if their numbers were really good, or at least as good as Waymo, why wouldn't they share them for the positive press? Waymo doesn't get as many negative pieces like this. It's a pretty logical conclusion to say that numbers they won't share must make them look bad in some way.

ModernMech 9mo ago

Of course, it could be no other way for a company that unleashed "FSD Beta" onto the streets and allowed all of us to be subjected to their bloody (literally) beta test. You don't get a safer future with "move fast and break things" mentality. Especially when the CEO is as illiterate as Musk about his own technology that he discount the results of actual experts in the field. I mean, just look at the trail of headless corpses (there actually are multiple) left by Tesla during this beta test. Weren't we all here to witness a previous version of the thing running straight through a cartoon wall? Of course this thing was always going to end in disappointment -- it's sucked its whole existence. It's never been serious it's always been an 80/20 play hoping to get away with the con without delivering the rest of the 20% that makes it work. Tesla's technology is bunk, their entire FSD thesis of "vision only" has been a dismal failure, and it's actually going to tank the entire Tesla car brand. I've been saying this for a while and it looks like it's finally starting to happen: Tesla is going to exit the car business never having delivered FSD in any viable capacity (although they'll claim total success), and Musk will retarget his empire to running the same FSD grift but with robots. Musk learned the bigger the promise, the more runway people give you to make it a reality. Spin a big enough yarn and Musk can live the rest of his life delivering nothing -- not Mars, not FSD, not AI, nada -- and people will still call him a genius.

simondotau 9mo ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8564Ne3kai0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8564Ne3kai0

spprashant 9mo ago

Most of us are very well aware of Tesla's shortcomings with FSD and inflated valuations. But electrek's reporting is biased and in bad faith when it comes to Tesla/Musk.

culi 9mo ago
A recent iSeeCars study that found that Tesla as a brand had the highest fatal crash rate in the US https://www.iseecars.com/most-dangerous-cars-study#:~:text=The%20Most%20Dangerous%20Car%20Brands https://www.iseecars.com/most-dangerous-cars-study#:~:text=T...

smoovb 9mo ago

electrek.co recent Tesla headline summary with sentiment: (negative) Tesla to stop selling Full Self-Driving package, moves to subscription-only (negative) Elon Musk says Tesla 'almost done' with AI5 design, 6 months after saying it was 'finished' (negative) Tesla's full 2025 data from Europe is in, and it is a total bloodbath (neutral) Tesla updates 2026 Model Y with new features, launches tiny third row in the US (positive) Tesla launches US-made solar panel, a rare sign of life for its solar business (negative) Elon Musk moves goalpost again: admits Tesla needs 10 billion miles for 'safe unsupervised' FSD (negative) Are Tesla Gigafactory Berlin's days numbered? (negative) Elon Musk shows total ignorance of Tesla's current falling sales trajectory (negative) Tesla rolls out 0% financing to boost declining sales (negative) Tesla (TSLA) releases Q4 delivery results: confirms decline in sales is accelerating (negative) Tesla Cybercabs spotted testing, unsurprisingly with steering wheels (negative) Elon Musk's top 5 Tesla predictions for 2025 that didn't happen (negative) Tesla (TSLA) does something unusual ahead of Q4 delivery results (negative) Elon Musk drops 'sustainable' from Tesla's mission (negative) Tesla's Robotaxi project in Austin is much smaller than Musk claims (neutral) Tesla Robotaxi spotted without a safety driver in Austin; Musk confirms testing begins (negative) Tesla US sales drop to under 40,000 units following tax credit expiration (neutral) Tesla CEO Elon Musk claims driverless Robotaxis coming to Austin in 3 weeks (positive) Tesla announces 2025 holiday update with a few cool features (negative) Tesla (TSLA) sales keep crashing in Europe with a single market temporarily saving it

flakeoil 9mo ago
But is that electrec's or Tesla's fault?

culi 9mo ago

This comes after a recent iSeeCars study that found that Tesla as a brand had the highest fatal crash rate in the US (with Kia being a very close second) https://www.iseecars.com/most-dangerous-cars-study#:~:text=The%20Most%20Dangerous%20Car%20Brands https://www.iseecars.com/most-dangerous-cars-study#:~:text=T...

_ea1k 9mo ago

TBH, the comments here amaze me. The claim is that a human being paid to monitor a driver assistance feature is 3x more likely to crash than a human alone. That needs extraordinary evidence. Instead the evidence is misleading guesses.

estearum 9mo ago
That... is not really an extraordinary claim. That has been many people's null hypothesis since before this technology was even deployed, and the rationale for it is sufficiently borne out to play a role in vigilance systems across nearly every other industry that relies on automation. A safety system with blurry performance boundaries is called "a massive risk." That's why responsible system designers first define their ODD, then design their system to perform to a pre-specified standard within that ODD. Tesla's technology is "works mostly pretty well in many but not all scenarios and we can't tell you which is which" It is not an extraordinary claim at all that such a system could yield worse outcomes than a human with no asssistance.
overfeed 9mo ago
> That needs extraordinary evidence. Waymo studied this back when it was a Google moonshot, and concluded that going full automation is safer than human supervision. A driving system that mostly works lulls the driver into complacency. Besides automation failure, driver complacency was a big component[1] of the fatal accident that led to the shuttering of Ubers self-driving efforts - the safety driver was looking at her phone for minutes in the lead up. It is also the reason why driver attention is monitored in L2
- pardon_me 9mo ago
  If rider and pedestrian safety is the main concern, the automated assistance and safety systems that car manufacturers were already developing make the most sense. They either warn or intervene in situations the human may not realize they are in danger and/or do not respond in time. Developing these solves the harder problems first, automation is easy in comparison. The idea that mostly-automating the system because it's statistically better than humans, but requiring human-assistance to monitor and respond in these exact situations, was flawed logic to begin with. Comparisons of statistics should be made like-for-like, given these are scenarios we can easily control. For example, a robotic taxis should at least be compared to professional drivers on similar routes, roads, vehicles, and times of day. Not just comparing "all drivers in all vehicles in all scenarios over time" with private company data that cherry-picks "automated driving" miles on highways etc. (where existing assistance systems could already achieve near-perfect results). Companies testing autonomy on the public should be forced to upload all crash data to investigators as part of their licensing. The vehicles already have extremely detailed sensor and video data to operate. The fact that we have no verified data to compare to existing human statistics is damning. It's a farce.

OfflineSergio 9mo ago

this is not good but the point is this can be improved much easier than improving human accidents rate. Both are very difficult problems, but one is certainly harder.

tsimionescu 9mo ago
That's not really true. There are huge discrepancies in human human driver accident data across different countries, which shows that there are clear practices one could deploy to significantly reduce driving incidents - people just choose to not implement them.

4fterd4rk 9mo ago

The human accident count per mile is brought down by a lot of highway miles. The Robotaxi is, at present, geofenced. It's not going to be getting a lot of highway miles. Most crashes happen on city streets.

mejthemage 9mo ago

Humans average one police reported accident per 500,000 miles?! TIL I'm incredibly unlucky.

DeathMetal3000 9mo ago
You’re just a bad driver;)
simondotau 9mo ago
You're not. All you need to do is look around a typical car park and count witness marks on car bumpers to know that accidents are extremely common. One study put the estimate at one "driving mistake" every 500 miles and one crash every 60,000 miles. An insurance policy study estimates that the average person is involved in 3–4 collisions in their lifetime.

oleumbudget 9mo ago

Wow thats interesting to know and is quite concerning

93po 9mo ago

I really wish we'd ban electrek articles on HN, they're constantly false, misleading, or just grinding an axe.

moorebob 9mo ago

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fatheranton 9mo ago

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timzaman 9mo ago

Author (fred lambert) is a tesla shorter, and a total asshole. Didnt see that disclaimer on his website.