8 ms·

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-report

by z7 8mo 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 8mo 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 8mo ago
  You can do this with every topic. XYZ does not share this, so IT MUST BE BAD.
  - happymellon 8mo ago
    And it usually is.
    - LunicLynx 8mo ago
      [flagged]
      - gpderetta 8mo ago
        happymellon is not trying to sell you a̵ ̵b̵r̵i̵d̵g̵e̵ a self driving car though.
        happymellon 8mo ago
        If a company wants to sell you something, but wants to block access to information, the default position for everyone should be "it's probably because it's bad". If I have an investment fund and I refuse to tell you about the current performance, I hope you would be sceptical. If I try to sell you medicine and redact the information about whether it does what I claim, and block you from seeing how many people were poisoned from taking it, I hope that everyone would refuse to take it. The insanity I'm seeing here from Tesla defenders is amazing. I can only assume they've fully bought in to the vision and tied assets to it and refuse to acknowledge that they might lose everything.
  - deleted 8mo ago
    [deleted]
  - dgb23 8mo ago
    Yes, that's very often the case with things that would very likely be shared if it looked good. There are things that don't get shared out of principle. For example there are anonymous votes or behind the scenes negotiations without commitment or security critical data. But given that Musk tends to parade around vague promises since a very long time, it seems sharing data that looks very good would certainly be something they would do.
  - close04 8mo ago
    It's a public company making money off of some claims. Not being transparent about the data supporting those claims is already a huge red flag and failure on their part regardless of what the data says.
  - freejazz 8mo ago
    Are you familiar with the term "common sense"? They say it ain't so common
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
shushpanchik 8mo ago
To add to that, most of the events described in the article - hitting cyclist, hit when reversing, hit stationary item on parking etc - happen during low speed city driving, but most miles for average driver are driven on highways. So, taxis, that are driven most of the time in city, would definitely get more crashes per mile than average driver. So 500,000/200,000 miles number could not be really applied to a taxi. I exect that number for taxis could be much lower. Also, even for a non-taxi, 200,000 miles between minor hits on average seems incredibly high - that would mean that an average car in US does not hit anything in a car's lifetime. I'm not sure where that number is coming from, if that's non-reportable events.
fabian2k 8mo ago
I think it's fair to put the burden of proof here on Tesla. They should convince people that their Robotaxis are safe. If they redact the details about all incidents so that you cannot figure out who's at fault, that's on Tesla alone.
- LunicLynx 8mo ago
  While I think Tesla should be transparent, this article doesn't really make sure it is comparing apples to apples either. I think its weird to characterize it as legitimate and the say "Go Tesla convince me ohterwise" as if the same audience would ever be reached by Tesla or people would care to do their due diligence.
  - AlexandrB 8mo ago
    Tesla (Elon Musk really) has a long history of distorting the stats or outright lying about their self driving capabilities and safety. The fact that folks would be skeptical of any evidence Tesla provided in this case is a self-inflicted problem and well-deserved.
    - k4rli 8mo ago
      He did promise his electric trucks to be more cost-effective than trains (still nothing in 2026...). And "world's fastest supercar". And full self-driving by "next year" in 2015. None of these are offered in 2026. There have never been truthful statements from his companies, only hype & fluff for monetary gains.
      - ryandrake 8mo ago
        There used to be [EDIT: still is] a website[1] that listed all of Musk's promises and predictions about his businesses and showed you how long it's been since he said the promise would materialize. It's full of mostly old statements, probably because it's impossible to keep up with the amount of content being generated monthly. 1: https://elonmusk.today https://elonmusk.today
silon42 8mo ago
"insurance-reported" or "damage/repair-needed" would be a better criteria for problematic events than "police-reported".
sigmoid10 8mo ago
I've actually started ignoring all these reports. There is so much bad faith going on in self-driving tech on all sides, it is nearly impossible to come up with clean and controlled data, much less objective opinions. At this point the only thing I'd be willing to base an opinion on is if insurers ask for higher (or lower) rates for self-driving. Because then I can be sure they have the data and did the math right to maximise their profits.
- 4d4m 8mo ago
  Thank you. Everyone is hiding disengagement and settling to hide accidents. This will not be fixed or standardized without changes to the laws, which for self driving have been largely written by the handful of companies in the space. Total, complete regulatory capture.
- jraby3 8mo ago
  The biggest indicator for me that this headline isn't accurate is that Lemonade insurance just reduced the rate for Tesla FSD by 50%. They probably have accurate data and decided that Tesla's are significantly safer than human drivers.
  - waffletower 8mo ago
    There will be stronger evidence if more auto insurance companies follow suit.
  - gamblor956 8mo ago
    But that's not what happened... Lemonade announced an entirely new product for FSD driving, which it says should cut rates for FSD vehicles And importantly, FSD driving is no longer covered by the regular policy, so FSD drivers now need two separate insurance policies if using Lemonade: the regular insurance policy, and another one just for when using FSD. The actual combined cost of the two insurance policies is more than the previous policy was because they didn't reduce rates for the normal insurance policies.
    - 8mo ago
cbeach 8mo ago
[flagged]
- touwer 8mo ago
  He's probably smart then
- adriand 8mo ago
  I would call strong opposition to Musk a democratic responsibility, not a derangement. We are talking about a guy with a fondness for the far right and throwing Nazi salutes, and whose destruction of USAID had, by November 2025, resulted in “hundreds of thousands of deaths”. [1] Those, of course, are just a couple of examples. If strong opposition to that kind of evil makes me deranged, count me in. 1: https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/usaid-shutdown-has-led-to-hundreds-of-thousands-of-deaths/ https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/usaid-shutdown-has-led-to-hund...
  - gulfofamerica 8mo ago
    [dead]
  - cbeach 8mo ago
    [flagged]
    - ginko 8mo ago
      >The "salute" in particular is simply a politically-expedient freeze-frame from a Musk speech, where he said "my heart goes out to you all" and happened to raise his arm. Yeah, no. I thought so as well initially but then I saw the video. The guy throws out his arm straight out multiple times.
  - thegreatpeter 8mo ago
    Did you even read the article you sent? It’s all based on estimates. It is consensus seeking derangement at best
buran77 8mo ago
> The comparison isn't really like-for-like. This is a statement of fact but based on this assumption: > low-speed contact events that would often never show up as police-reported crashes for human drivers Assumptions work just as well both ways. Musk and Tesla have been consistently opaque when it comes to the real numbers they base their advertising on. Given this past history of total lack of transparency and outright lies it's safe to assume that any data provided by Tesla that can't be independently verified by multiple sources is heavily skewed in Tesla's favor. Whatever safety numbers Tesla puts out you can bet your hat they're worse in reality.
kreetx 8mo ago
electrek.co has a beef with Tesla, at least in the recent years.
- cbeach 8mo ago
  Absolutely. Let's examine the Elektrek editor's feed, to understand how "impartial" he is about Tesla: https://x.com/FredLambert https://x.com/FredLambert
  - kreetx 8mo ago
    Yup. Btw, do you happen to know, why electrek.co changed their tune in such a way? I was commenting on a similarly negative story by the same site, and said that they are always anti-Tesla. But then somebody pointed out that this wasn't always the case, that they were actually supportive, but then suddenly turned.
    - lastofthemojito 8mo ago
      Fred Lambert was an early Tesla evangelist - he constantly wrote stories praising Tesla and Elon for years. He had some interactions with Elon on Twitter, got invited to Tesla events, referred enough people to earn free Tesla cars, etc. People roasted him for being a Tesla/Elon fanboy: https://www.thedrive.com/tech/21838/the-truth-behind-electreks-dark-alliance-with-tesla https://www.thedrive.com/tech/21838/the-truth-behind-electre... Fred gradually started asking tougher questions when Tesla's schedule slipped on projects and Elon ended up feuding with Fred (and I think blocking him) on Twitter: https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/bgmwk8/twitter_exchange_between_elon_and_fred_is_getting/ https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/bgmwk8/twitter... Since then Fred has had a more realistic (IMHO) outlook on Tesla, although some might call it a "beef" since he's no longer an Elon sycophant.
      - hedora 8mo ago
        I think you're being a bit unfair to Lambert. If we assume the best (per HN guidelines): Up to about 2018 Tesla was the market-leading EV company, and the whole thesis of Electrek is that EVs are the future. So, of course they covered Tesla frequently and in a generally positive light. Since then, the facts have changed. Elon's become increasingly erratic, and has been making increasingly unhinged claims about Tesla's current and future products. At the same time, Tesla's offerings are far behind domestic standards, which are even further behind international competition. Also, many people have died due to obvious Tesla design flaws (like the door handles, and false advertising around FSD). Journalistic integrity explains the difference in coverage over the years. Coverage from any fact-based outlet would have a similar shift in sentiment.
PaulRobinson 8mo ago
TFA does a comparison with average (estimated), low-speed contact events that are not police-reported by humans, of one incident every 200,000 miles. I think that's high - if you're including backing into static objects in car parks and the like, you can look at workshop data and extrapolate that a lower figure might be closer to the mark. TFA also does a comparison with other self-driving car companies, which you acknowledge, but dismiss: however, we can't harmonize crash definitions and reporting practices as you would like, because Tesla is obfuscating their data. TFA's main point is that we can't really know what this data means because Tesla keep their data secret, but others like Waymo disclose everything they can, and are more transparent about what happened and why. TFA is actually saying Tesla should open up their data to allow for better analysis and comparison, because at the moment their current reporting practice make them look crazy bad.
- philipallstar 8mo ago
  > TFA's main point is that we can't really know what this data means because Tesla keep their data secret If that's so, then the article title is very poor.
  - _23sd 8mo ago
    [flagged]
  - lukeschlather 8mo ago
    I think the article's title is pretty fair because the thesis is that Tesla is keeping their data secret because it makes them look bad, which seems consistent with what we know.
- hedora 8mo ago
  > TFA does a comparison with average (estimated), low-speed contact events that are not police-reported by humans, of one incident every 200,000 miles. Where does it say that? I see "However, that figure doesn’t include non-police-reported incidents. When adding those, or rather an estimate of those, humans are closer to 200,000 miles between crashes, which is still a lot better than Tesla’s robotaxi in Austin." All but one of the Tesla crashes obviously involved significant property damage or injuries (the remaining one is ambiguous). So, based on the text of the article, they're assuming only 2/5ths of property damage / injury accidents are reported to the police. That's lower than I would have guessed (don't people use their car insurance, which requires the police report?), but presumably backed by data.
razingeden 8mo ago
Oh. Well then. May we see the details of these minor contact events so that people don’t have to come here and lie for them anymore? How corrupt and unaccountable to the public is the city of Austin Texas, even, for allowing them to turn in incident reports like this?
zzzeek 8mo ago
oh hacker news, never change. "crashes 3x as much as human driven cars" but is that REALLY bad? who knows? pure gold
- jimmydddd 8mo ago
  Humans driving cars crash more than humans walking on side walks. But is humans driving cars really bad?
  - queenkjuul 8mo ago
    Yes
tsimionescu 8mo ago
All of your arguments are expounded upon in the article itself, and their conclusions still hold, based on the publicly available data. The 3x figure in the title is based on a comparison of the Tesla reports with estimated average human driver miles without an incident, not based on police report data. The comparison with police-report data would lead to a 9x figure instead, which the article presents but quickly dismisses. The denominator problem is made up. Tesla Robotaxi has only been launched in one location, Austin, and only since July (well, 28th June, so maybe there is a few days discrepancy?). So the crash data and the miles data can only refer to this same period. Furthermore, if the miles driven are actually based on some additional length of time, then the picture gets even worse for Tesla, as the denominator for those 9 incidents gets smaller. The analysis indeed doesn't distinguish between the types of accidents, but this is irrelevant. The human driver estimates for miles driven without incident also don't distinguish between the types of incidents, so the comparison is still very fair (unless you believe people intentionally tried to get the Tesla cars to crash, which makes little sense). The comparison to Waymo is also done based on incidents reported by both companies under the same reporting requirements, to the same federal agency. The crash definitions and reporting practices are already harmonized, at least to a good extent, through this. Overall there is no way to look at this data and draw a conclusion that is significantly different from the article: Tesla is bad at autonomous driving, and has a long way to go until it can be considered safe on public roads. We should also remember that robotaxis are not even autonomous, in fact! Each car has a human safety monitor that is ready to step in and take control of the vehicle at any time to avoid incidents - so the real incident rate, if the safety monitor weren't there, would certainly be even worse than this. I'd also mention that 5 months of data is not that small a sample size, despite you trying to make it sound so (only 9 crashes).
- parineum 8mo ago
  > The 3x figure in the title is based on a comparison of the Tesla reports with estimated average human driver miles without an incident, not based on police report data. The comparison with police-report data would lead to a 9x figure instead, which the article presents but quickly dismisses. I think OP's point still stands here. Who are people reporting minor incidents to that would be publicly available that isn't the police? This data had to come from somewhere and police reports is the only thing that makes sense to me. If I bump my car into a post, I'm not telling any government office about it.
_ea1k 8mo ago
Good analysis. Just over a month ago, Electrek was posted here claiming that Teslas with humans were crashing 10x more than with humans alone. That was based on a sample size of 9 crashes. In the month following that, they've added one more crash while also increasing the miles driven per month. The headline could just as easily be about the dramatic decline in their crash rate! Or perhaps the data is just too small to analyze like this, and Electrek authors being their usual overly dramatic selves.
- epistasis 8mo ago
  That is an overly optimistic way to phrase an apparent decrease in crashes, when Tesla is not being upfront about data that at best looks like it's worse than human crash rates. Unless one was a Tesla insider, or had a huge interest in Tesla over other people on the road, such spin would not be a normal thing to propose saying. Media outlets, even ones devoted to EVs, should not adopt the very biased framing you propose.
- hedora 8mo ago
  I don't understand your claim. Previous article: Tesla with human supervisor at wheel: 10x worse than human alone. Current article: Tesla with remote supervisor: 3-9x worse than human alone. Given the small sample sizes, this shows a clear trend: Tesla's autopilot stuff (or perhaps vehicle design) is causing a ton of accidents, regardless of whether it's being operated locally by customers or remotely by professionals. I'd like to see similar studies broken down by vehicle manufacturer. The ADAS in one of our cars is great, but occasionally beeps when it shouldn't. The ADAS in our other car cannot be disabled and false positives every 10-20 miles. Every week or so it forces the vehicle out of lane (either left of double yellow line center, or into another car's lane). If the data on crash rates for those two models were public, I guarantee the latter car would have been recalled by now.
- fwip 8mo ago
  The 10x would be 9x if the methodology were the same. 9x->3x is going from reported accidents to inferred true accident rate, as the article points out.
- 8mo ago
jraby3 8mo ago
I find it interesting the Lemonade insurance just began offering a 50% discount for Tesla with FSD. Insurance companies are known for analytics and don't survive if they use bad data. This points to your comment being correct.
- quadrature 8mo ago
  Thats a completely different scenario than fully autonomous driving.
- FireBeyond 8mo ago
  Who knows the backend deals there, everything up to and including Tesla subsidizing the premiums.
dzhiurgis 8mo ago
This is from elektrek. You cannot believe anything you see from them regarding Tesla. Completely corrupt site.
FireBeyond 8mo 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. Tesla's own stats don't count any accident without airbag deployment, regardless of severity (and modern airbag systems have a number of factors that play into deployment), and, for some unknown reason, they don't count fatalities in their crash statistics.

by z7 8mo ago

xnx 8mo 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 8mo ago
You can do this with every topic. XYZ does not share this, so IT MUST BE BAD.
- happymellon 8mo ago
  And it usually is.
  - LunicLynx 8mo ago
    [flagged]
    - gpderetta 8mo ago
      happymellon is not trying to sell you a̵ ̵b̵r̵i̵d̵g̵e̵ a self driving car though.
      - happymellon 8mo ago
        If a company wants to sell you something, but wants to block access to information, the default position for everyone should be "it's probably because it's bad". If I have an investment fund and I refuse to tell you about the current performance, I hope you would be sceptical. If I try to sell you medicine and redact the information about whether it does what I claim, and block you from seeing how many people were poisoned from taking it, I hope that everyone would refuse to take it. The insanity I'm seeing here from Tesla defenders is amazing. I can only assume they've fully bought in to the vision and tied assets to it and refuse to acknowledge that they might lose everything.
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
- dgb23 8mo ago
  Yes, that's very often the case with things that would very likely be shared if it looked good. There are things that don't get shared out of principle. For example there are anonymous votes or behind the scenes negotiations without commitment or security critical data. But given that Musk tends to parade around vague promises since a very long time, it seems sharing data that looks very good would certainly be something they would do.
- close04 8mo ago
  It's a public company making money off of some claims. Not being transparent about the data supporting those claims is already a huge red flag and failure on their part regardless of what the data says.
- freejazz 8mo ago
  Are you familiar with the term "common sense"? They say it ain't so common

deleted 8mo ago

[deleted]

shushpanchik 8mo ago

To add to that, most of the events described in the article - hitting cyclist, hit when reversing, hit stationary item on parking etc - happen during low speed city driving, but most miles for average driver are driven on highways. So, taxis, that are driven most of the time in city, would definitely get more crashes per mile than average driver. So 500,000/200,000 miles number could not be really applied to a taxi. I exect that number for taxis could be much lower. Also, even for a non-taxi, 200,000 miles between minor hits on average seems incredibly high - that would mean that an average car in US does not hit anything in a car's lifetime. I'm not sure where that number is coming from, if that's non-reportable events.

fabian2k 8mo ago

I think it's fair to put the burden of proof here on Tesla. They should convince people that their Robotaxis are safe. If they redact the details about all incidents so that you cannot figure out who's at fault, that's on Tesla alone.

LunicLynx 8mo ago
While I think Tesla should be transparent, this article doesn't really make sure it is comparing apples to apples either. I think its weird to characterize it as legitimate and the say "Go Tesla convince me ohterwise" as if the same audience would ever be reached by Tesla or people would care to do their due diligence.
- AlexandrB 8mo ago
  Tesla (Elon Musk really) has a long history of distorting the stats or outright lying about their self driving capabilities and safety. The fact that folks would be skeptical of any evidence Tesla provided in this case is a self-inflicted problem and well-deserved.
  - k4rli 8mo ago
    He did promise his electric trucks to be more cost-effective than trains (still nothing in 2026...). And "world's fastest supercar". And full self-driving by "next year" in 2015. None of these are offered in 2026. There have never been truthful statements from his companies, only hype & fluff for monetary gains.
    - ryandrake 8mo ago
      There used to be [EDIT: still is] a website[1] that listed all of Musk's promises and predictions about his businesses and showed you how long it's been since he said the promise would materialize. It's full of mostly old statements, probably because it's impossible to keep up with the amount of content being generated monthly. 1: https://elonmusk.today https://elonmusk.today

silon42 8mo ago

"insurance-reported" or "damage/repair-needed" would be a better criteria for problematic events than "police-reported".

sigmoid10 8mo ago

I've actually started ignoring all these reports. There is so much bad faith going on in self-driving tech on all sides, it is nearly impossible to come up with clean and controlled data, much less objective opinions. At this point the only thing I'd be willing to base an opinion on is if insurers ask for higher (or lower) rates for self-driving. Because then I can be sure they have the data and did the math right to maximise their profits.

4d4m 8mo ago
Thank you. Everyone is hiding disengagement and settling to hide accidents. This will not be fixed or standardized without changes to the laws, which for self driving have been largely written by the handful of companies in the space. Total, complete regulatory capture.
jraby3 8mo ago
The biggest indicator for me that this headline isn't accurate is that Lemonade insurance just reduced the rate for Tesla FSD by 50%. They probably have accurate data and decided that Tesla's are significantly safer than human drivers.
- waffletower 8mo ago
  There will be stronger evidence if more auto insurance companies follow suit.
- gamblor956 8mo ago
  But that's not what happened... Lemonade announced an entirely new product for FSD driving, which it says should cut rates for FSD vehicles And importantly, FSD driving is no longer covered by the regular policy, so FSD drivers now need two separate insurance policies if using Lemonade: the regular insurance policy, and another one just for when using FSD. The actual combined cost of the two insurance policies is more than the previous policy was because they didn't reduce rates for the normal insurance policies.
  - 8mo ago

cbeach 8mo ago

[flagged]

touwer 8mo ago
He's probably smart then
adriand 8mo ago
I would call strong opposition to Musk a democratic responsibility, not a derangement. We are talking about a guy with a fondness for the far right and throwing Nazi salutes, and whose destruction of USAID had, by November 2025, resulted in “hundreds of thousands of deaths”. [1] Those, of course, are just a couple of examples. If strong opposition to that kind of evil makes me deranged, count me in. 1: https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/usaid-shutdown-has-led-to-hundreds-of-thousands-of-deaths/ https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/usaid-shutdown-has-led-to-hund...
- gulfofamerica 8mo ago
  [dead]
- cbeach 8mo ago
  [flagged]
  - ginko 8mo ago
    >The "salute" in particular is simply a politically-expedient freeze-frame from a Musk speech, where he said "my heart goes out to you all" and happened to raise his arm. Yeah, no. I thought so as well initially but then I saw the video. The guy throws out his arm straight out multiple times.
- thegreatpeter 8mo ago
  Did you even read the article you sent? It’s all based on estimates. It is consensus seeking derangement at best

buran77 8mo ago

> The comparison isn't really like-for-like. This is a statement of fact but based on this assumption: > low-speed contact events that would often never show up as police-reported crashes for human drivers Assumptions work just as well both ways. Musk and Tesla have been consistently opaque when it comes to the real numbers they base their advertising on. Given this past history of total lack of transparency and outright lies it's safe to assume that any data provided by Tesla that can't be independently verified by multiple sources is heavily skewed in Tesla's favor. Whatever safety numbers Tesla puts out you can bet your hat they're worse in reality.

kreetx 8mo ago

electrek.co has a beef with Tesla, at least in the recent years.

cbeach 8mo ago
Absolutely. Let's examine the Elektrek editor's feed, to understand how "impartial" he is about Tesla: https://x.com/FredLambert https://x.com/FredLambert
- kreetx 8mo ago
  Yup. Btw, do you happen to know, why electrek.co changed their tune in such a way? I was commenting on a similarly negative story by the same site, and said that they are always anti-Tesla. But then somebody pointed out that this wasn't always the case, that they were actually supportive, but then suddenly turned.
  - lastofthemojito 8mo ago
    Fred Lambert was an early Tesla evangelist - he constantly wrote stories praising Tesla and Elon for years. He had some interactions with Elon on Twitter, got invited to Tesla events, referred enough people to earn free Tesla cars, etc. People roasted him for being a Tesla/Elon fanboy: https://www.thedrive.com/tech/21838/the-truth-behind-electreks-dark-alliance-with-tesla https://www.thedrive.com/tech/21838/the-truth-behind-electre... Fred gradually started asking tougher questions when Tesla's schedule slipped on projects and Elon ended up feuding with Fred (and I think blocking him) on Twitter: https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/bgmwk8/twitter_exchange_between_elon_and_fred_is_getting/ https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/bgmwk8/twitter... Since then Fred has had a more realistic (IMHO) outlook on Tesla, although some might call it a "beef" since he's no longer an Elon sycophant.
    - hedora 8mo ago
      I think you're being a bit unfair to Lambert. If we assume the best (per HN guidelines): Up to about 2018 Tesla was the market-leading EV company, and the whole thesis of Electrek is that EVs are the future. So, of course they covered Tesla frequently and in a generally positive light. Since then, the facts have changed. Elon's become increasingly erratic, and has been making increasingly unhinged claims about Tesla's current and future products. At the same time, Tesla's offerings are far behind domestic standards, which are even further behind international competition. Also, many people have died due to obvious Tesla design flaws (like the door handles, and false advertising around FSD). Journalistic integrity explains the difference in coverage over the years. Coverage from any fact-based outlet would have a similar shift in sentiment.

PaulRobinson 8mo ago

TFA does a comparison with average (estimated), low-speed contact events that are not police-reported by humans, of one incident every 200,000 miles. I think that's high - if you're including backing into static objects in car parks and the like, you can look at workshop data and extrapolate that a lower figure might be closer to the mark. TFA also does a comparison with other self-driving car companies, which you acknowledge, but dismiss: however, we can't harmonize crash definitions and reporting practices as you would like, because Tesla is obfuscating their data. TFA's main point is that we can't really know what this data means because Tesla keep their data secret, but others like Waymo disclose everything they can, and are more transparent about what happened and why. TFA is actually saying Tesla should open up their data to allow for better analysis and comparison, because at the moment their current reporting practice make them look crazy bad.

philipallstar 8mo ago
> TFA's main point is that we can't really know what this data means because Tesla keep their data secret If that's so, then the article title is very poor.
- _23sd 8mo ago
  [flagged]
- lukeschlather 8mo ago
  I think the article's title is pretty fair because the thesis is that Tesla is keeping their data secret because it makes them look bad, which seems consistent with what we know.
hedora 8mo ago
> TFA does a comparison with average (estimated), low-speed contact events that are not police-reported by humans, of one incident every 200,000 miles. Where does it say that? I see "However, that figure doesn’t include non-police-reported incidents. When adding those, or rather an estimate of those, humans are closer to 200,000 miles between crashes, which is still a lot better than Tesla’s robotaxi in Austin." All but one of the Tesla crashes obviously involved significant property damage or injuries (the remaining one is ambiguous). So, based on the text of the article, they're assuming only 2/5ths of property damage / injury accidents are reported to the police. That's lower than I would have guessed (don't people use their car insurance, which requires the police report?), but presumably backed by data.

razingeden 8mo ago

Oh. Well then. May we see the details of these minor contact events so that people don’t have to come here and lie for them anymore? How corrupt and unaccountable to the public is the city of Austin Texas, even, for allowing them to turn in incident reports like this?

zzzeek 8mo ago

oh hacker news, never change. "crashes 3x as much as human driven cars" but is that REALLY bad? who knows? pure gold

jimmydddd 8mo ago
Humans driving cars crash more than humans walking on side walks. But is humans driving cars really bad?
- queenkjuul 8mo ago
  Yes

tsimionescu 8mo ago

All of your arguments are expounded upon in the article itself, and their conclusions still hold, based on the publicly available data. The 3x figure in the title is based on a comparison of the Tesla reports with estimated average human driver miles without an incident, not based on police report data. The comparison with police-report data would lead to a 9x figure instead, which the article presents but quickly dismisses. The denominator problem is made up. Tesla Robotaxi has only been launched in one location, Austin, and only since July (well, 28th June, so maybe there is a few days discrepancy?). So the crash data and the miles data can only refer to this same period. Furthermore, if the miles driven are actually based on some additional length of time, then the picture gets even worse for Tesla, as the denominator for those 9 incidents gets smaller. The analysis indeed doesn't distinguish between the types of accidents, but this is irrelevant. The human driver estimates for miles driven without incident also don't distinguish between the types of incidents, so the comparison is still very fair (unless you believe people intentionally tried to get the Tesla cars to crash, which makes little sense). The comparison to Waymo is also done based on incidents reported by both companies under the same reporting requirements, to the same federal agency. The crash definitions and reporting practices are already harmonized, at least to a good extent, through this. Overall there is no way to look at this data and draw a conclusion that is significantly different from the article: Tesla is bad at autonomous driving, and has a long way to go until it can be considered safe on public roads. We should also remember that robotaxis are not even autonomous, in fact! Each car has a human safety monitor that is ready to step in and take control of the vehicle at any time to avoid incidents - so the real incident rate, if the safety monitor weren't there, would certainly be even worse than this. I'd also mention that 5 months of data is not that small a sample size, despite you trying to make it sound so (only 9 crashes).

parineum 8mo ago
> The 3x figure in the title is based on a comparison of the Tesla reports with estimated average human driver miles without an incident, not based on police report data. The comparison with police-report data would lead to a 9x figure instead, which the article presents but quickly dismisses. I think OP's point still stands here. Who are people reporting minor incidents to that would be publicly available that isn't the police? This data had to come from somewhere and police reports is the only thing that makes sense to me. If I bump my car into a post, I'm not telling any government office about it.

_ea1k 8mo ago

Good analysis. Just over a month ago, Electrek was posted here claiming that Teslas with humans were crashing 10x more than with humans alone. That was based on a sample size of 9 crashes. In the month following that, they've added one more crash while also increasing the miles driven per month. The headline could just as easily be about the dramatic decline in their crash rate! Or perhaps the data is just too small to analyze like this, and Electrek authors being their usual overly dramatic selves.

epistasis 8mo ago
That is an overly optimistic way to phrase an apparent decrease in crashes, when Tesla is not being upfront about data that at best looks like it's worse than human crash rates. Unless one was a Tesla insider, or had a huge interest in Tesla over other people on the road, such spin would not be a normal thing to propose saying. Media outlets, even ones devoted to EVs, should not adopt the very biased framing you propose.
hedora 8mo ago
I don't understand your claim. Previous article: Tesla with human supervisor at wheel: 10x worse than human alone. Current article: Tesla with remote supervisor: 3-9x worse than human alone. Given the small sample sizes, this shows a clear trend: Tesla's autopilot stuff (or perhaps vehicle design) is causing a ton of accidents, regardless of whether it's being operated locally by customers or remotely by professionals. I'd like to see similar studies broken down by vehicle manufacturer. The ADAS in one of our cars is great, but occasionally beeps when it shouldn't. The ADAS in our other car cannot be disabled and false positives every 10-20 miles. Every week or so it forces the vehicle out of lane (either left of double yellow line center, or into another car's lane). If the data on crash rates for those two models were public, I guarantee the latter car would have been recalled by now.
fwip 8mo ago
The 10x would be 9x if the methodology were the same. 9x->3x is going from reported accidents to inferred true accident rate, as the article points out.
8mo ago

jraby3 8mo ago

I find it interesting the Lemonade insurance just began offering a 50% discount for Tesla with FSD. Insurance companies are known for analytics and don't survive if they use bad data. This points to your comment being correct.

quadrature 8mo ago
Thats a completely different scenario than fully autonomous driving.
FireBeyond 8mo ago
Who knows the backend deals there, everything up to and including Tesla subsidizing the premiums.

dzhiurgis 8mo ago

This is from elektrek. You cannot believe anything you see from them regarding Tesla. Completely corrupt site.

FireBeyond 8mo 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. Tesla's own stats don't count any accident without airbag deployment, regardless of severity (and modern airbag systems have a number of factors that play into deployment), and, for some unknown reason, they don't count fatalities in their crash statistics.