It is important to note that this is with safety drivers. Professional driver + their most advanced "Robotaxi" FSD version under test with careful scrutiny is 4x worse than the average non-professional driver alone and averaging 57,000 miles per minor collision.
Yet it is quite odd how Tesla also reports that untrained customers using old versions of FSD with outdated hardware average 1,500,000 miles per minor collision [1], a literal 3000% difference, when there are no penalties for incorrect reporting.
Robotaxi supevision is just an emergency brake switch.
Consumer supervision is having all the controls of the car right there in front of you. And if you are doing it right, you have your hands on wheel and foot on the pedals ready to jump in.
> Robotaxi supevision is just an emergency brake switch
That was the case when they first started the trial in Austin. The employee in the car was a safety monitor sitting in the front passenger seat with an emergency brake button.
Later, when they started expanding the service area to include highways they moved them to the driver seat on those trips so that they can completely take over if something unsafe is happening.
Nah the relevant factor, which has been obvious to anyone who cared to think about this stuff honestly for years, is that Tesla's safety claims on FSD are meaningless.
Accident rates under cruise control are also extremely below average.
Why?
Because people use cruise control (and FSD) under specific conditions. Namely: good ones! Ones where accidents already happen at a way below-average rate!
Tesla has always been able to publish the data required to really understand performance, which would be normalized by age of vehicle and driving conditions. But they have not, for reasons that have always been obvious but are absolutely undeniable now.
That just makes the Robotaxi even more irresponsible.
I think they were so used to defending Autopilot that they got confused.
To be fair to Tesla and other self driving taxis, urban and shorter journeys usually have worse collision rates than the average journey - and FSD is likely to be owners driving themselves to work etc.
Great, we can use Tesla's own numbers once again by selecting non-highway. Average human is 178,000 non-highway miles per minor collision resulting in "Professional Driver + Most Advanced 'Robotaxi' FSD version under test with careful scrutiny" at 3x worse than the average non-professional driver alone.
They advertise and market a safety claim of 986,000 non-highway miles per minor collision. They are claiming, risking the lives of their customers, that their objectively inferior product with objectively worse deployment controls is 1,700% better than their most advanced product under careful controls and scrutiny when there are no penalties for incorrect reporting.
It is kind of comparing apples to oranges. The more appropriate would be to compare it with other Taxis.
Generally about 1 accident per 217k miles. Which still means that Tesla is having accidents at a 4x rate. However, there may be underreporting and that could be the source of the difference. Also, the safety drivers may have prevented a lot of accidents too.
The problem Tesla faces and their investors are unaware of, is that just because you have a Modey Y that has driven you around for thousands of miles without incident does not mean Tesla has autonomous driving solved.
Tesla needs their FSD system to be driving hundreds of thousands of miles without incident. Not the 5,000 miles Michael FSD-is-awesome-I-use-it-daily Smith posts incessantly on X about.
There is this mismatch where overly represented people who champion FSD say it's great and has no issues, and the reality is none of them are remotely close to putting in enough miles to cross the "it's safe to deploy" threshold.
A fleet of robotaxis will do more FSD miles in an afternoon than your average Tesla fanatic will do in a decade. I can promise you that Elon was sweating hard during each of the few unsupervised rides they have offered.
> hundreds of thousands of miles without incident
Almost there. Humans kill one person every 100 million miles driven. To reach mass adoption, self-driving car need to kill one every, say, billion miles. Which means dozens or hundreds of billions miles driven to reach statistical significance.
> to reach mass adoption, self-driving car need to kill one every, say, billion miles
They need to be around parity. So a death every 100mm miles or so. The number of folks who want radically more safety are about balanced by those who want a product in market quicker.
Tesla's Robotaxis are bringing a bad name to the entire field of autonomous driving. The average consumer isn't going to make a distinction between Tesla vs. Waymo. When they hear about these Robotaxi crashes, they will assume all robotic driving is crash prone, dangerous and irresponsible.
> The average consumer isn't going to make a distinction between Tesla vs. Waymo.
I think they do. That's the whole point of brand value.
Even my non-tech friends seem to know that with self-driving, Waymo is safe and Tesla is not.
Yep. Especially when one of the brands is Tesla.
Once Elon put himself at the epicenter of American political life, Tesla stopped being treated as a brand, and more a placeholder for Elon himself.
Waymo has excellent branding and first to market advantage in defining how self-driving is perceived by users. But, the alternative being Elon's Tesla further widens the perception gap.
I think the Tesla brand and the Elon brand have always been attached at the hip. This was fine when the Elon brand was "eccentric founder who likes memes, wants to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels, and plans to launch a Mars colony." It only became a marketing problem when he went down the right wing rabbit hole and started sieg heiling on stage.
I really don't think that's true. Think Uber vs. Lyft. I know I distinguish between the two even if the experience is usually about the same and people I know where this has come up in conversation generally see Lyft as "off-brand" and a little more skeevy. They only take Lyfts when it's cheaper or quicker than Uber.
I'm probably not the average consumer in this situation but I was in Austin recently and took both Waymo and Robotaxi. I significantly preferred the Waymo experience. It felt far more integrated and... complete? It also felt very safe (it avoided getting into an accident in a circumstance where I certainly would have crashed).
I hope Tesla gets their act together so that the autonomous taxi market can engage in real price discovery instead of "same price as an Uber but you don't have to tip." Surely it's lower than that especially as more and more of these vehicles get onto the road.
Unrelated to driving ability but related to the brand discussion: that graffiti font Tesla uses for Cybertruck and Robotaxi is SO ugly and cringey. That alone gives me a slight aversion.
I’m not so sure. I think Tesla is so tied up in Musk’s personality that Tesla and Waymo aren’t in the same field, likewise with Optimus. Tesla isn’t self-driving, it is Tesla. Especially now that many mainstream vehicles ship with various levels of self-driving, a lot of people have a lot of exposure to it. Tesla has the best brand recognition but they no longer define the product. Tesla is Tesla, Waymo is self-driving.
Most people are able to be more nuanced than your typical hn zealot. They strongly dislike Musk, but are begrudgingly able to give credit where credit is due wrt Tesla, SpaceX, etc.
yes, I talk to people and they have confidence in tesla. But then I mention that waymo is level 4 and tesla is level 2, and it doesn't make any difference.
I don't know what a clear/direct way of explaining the difference would be.
Yep, feels a lot like that submarine that got crushed trying to get to the Titanic a year or two ago. It made the entire marine industry look worse, and other companies making submarines were concerned it would hurt their business.
Inb4: not remotely in the marine field, so a genuine question. Would it really make an impact?
Robotaxis market is much broader than the submersibles one, so the effect of consumers' irrationality would be much bigger there. I'd expect an average customer of the submarines market to do quite a bit more research on what they're getting into.
Having the whole world meming on rich dudes in submarines could plausibly make the whole industry seem less cool to people with the money to buy even a good submarine. Imagine being a rich dude with a new submarine and everybody you talk to about it snickers about you getting crushed like Stockton. Maybe you'd just buy a bigger yacht and skip the submarine, which you were probably only buying for the cool factor in the first place...
The difference is the OceanGate Titan failure only harmed those who didn't do their due diligence and the grossly negligent owner. The risk was contained to those who explicitly opted in. In this case, Tesla Robotaxis harm others to keep Tesla's valuation and share price propped up. The performance art is the investor relations.
This is actually a rational explanation for this. Perhaps Elon wants to sink the whole industry until he can actually build a self driving car like Waymo's.
He wants to break trust in the whole industry by giving Tesla a massive black eye, undoubtedly hurting their stock and sales significantly, in order to, later, create actual self driving cars into the market that he's already poisoned?
Totally rational.
Elon's drug addled brain doesn't make rational decisions.
Well, admittedly maybe I should have said "rational to Elon on Ketamine"
> are bringing a bad name to the entire field of autonomous driving.
A small number of humans bring a bad name to the entire field of regular driving.
> The average consumer isn't going to make a distinction between Tesla vs. Waymo.
What's actually "distinct?" The secret sauce of their code? It always amazed me that corporate giants were willing to compete over cab rides. It sort of makes me feel, tongue in cheek, that they have fully run out of ideas.
> they will assume all robotic driving is crash prone
The difference in failure modes between regular driving and autonomous driving is stark. Many consumers feel the overall compromise is unviable even if the error rates between providers are different.
Watching a Waymo drive into oncoming traffic, pull over, and hear a tech support voice talk to you over the nav system is quite the experience. You can have zero crashes, but if your users end up in this scenario, they're not going to appreciate the difference.
They're not investors. They're just people who have somewhere to go. They don't _care_ about "the field". Nor should they.
> dangerous and irresponsible.
These are, in fact, pilot programs. Why this lede always gets buried is beyond me. Instead of accepting the data and incorporating it into the world view here, people just want to wave their hands and dissemble over how difficult this problem _actually_ is.
Hacker News has always assumed this problem is easy. It is not.
> Hacker News has always assumed this problem is easy. It is not.
That’s the problem right there.
It’s EXTREMELY hard.
Waymo has very carefully increased its abilities, tip-toeing forward little by little until after all this time they’ve achieved the abilities they have with great safety numbers.
Tesla appears to continuously make big jumps they seem totally unprepared for yelling “YOLO” and then expect to be treated the same when it doesn’t work out by saying “but it’s hard.”
I have zero respect for how they’ve approached this since day 1 of autopilot and think what they’re doing is flat out dangerous.
So yeah. Some of us call them out. A lot. And they seem to keep providing evidence we may be right.
I’ve often felt that much of the crowd touting how close the problem was to being solved was conflating a driving problem to just being a perception problem. Perception is just a sub-space of the driving problem.
Genuine question though: has Waymo gotten better at their reporting? A couple years back they seemingly inflated their safety numbers by sanitizing the classifications with subjective “a human would have crashed too so we don’t count it as an accident”. That is measuring something quite different than how safety numbers are colloquially interpreted.
It seems like there is a need for more standardized testing and reporting, but I may be out of the loop.
> achieved the abilities they have with great safety numbers.
Driving around in good weather and never on freeways is not much of an achievement. Having vehicles that continually interfere in active medical and police cordons isn't particularly safe, even though there haven't been terrible consequences from it, yet.
If all you're doing is observing a single number you're drastically under prepared for what happens when they expand this program beyond these paltry self imposed limits.
> Some of us call them out.
You should be working to get their certificate pulled at the government level. If this program is so dangerous then why wouldn't you do that?
> And they seem to keep providing evidence we may be right.
It's tragic you can't apply the same logic in isolation to Waymo.
Freeways are far easier for a robot to drive on than streets. Driving on freeways would significantly lower Waymo's accident per mile rate.
The difference is that accidents on a freeway are far more likely to be fatal than accidents on a city street.
Waymo didn't avoid freeways because they were hard, they avoided them because they were dangerous.
Freeway accidents, due to their nature, are a lot harder to ignore and underreport than accidentally bumping or scraping into another car at low speeds. It's like using murder rates to estimate real crime rates because murders, unlike most other crimes, are far more likely to be properly documented.
Waymo started rolling out freeway trips in some cities late last year
Waymo overall has a FANTASTIC safety record and has been improving steadily. You can't say the same about Tesla's FSD and Robotaxi.
LIDAR gives Waymo a fundamental advantage.
Elon definitely has this cult of personality around him where people will jump in and defend his companies (as a stand-in for him) on the internet, even in the face of some common sense observations. I don't get the sense that anything you've said is particularly reasonable outside of being lured in by Elon's personality.
This is absolutely true. There is a flip side however, where people who dislike Elon Musk will sometimes talk up his competitors, seemingly for no good reason other than them being at least nominally competitors to Musk companies. Nikola and Spinlaunch are two that come to mind; quite blatant scams that have gotten far too much attention because they aren't Musk companies.
Tesla FSD is crap. But I also think we wouldn't see quite so much praise of Waymo unless Tesla also had aspirations in this domain. Genuinely, what is so great about a robo taxi even if it works well? Do people really hate immigrants this much?
I said in earlier reports about this, it's difficult to draw statistical comparisons with humans because there's so little data. Having said that, it is clear that this system just isn't ready and it's kind of wild that a couple of those crashes would've been easily preventable with parking sensors that come equipped as standard on almost every other car.
In some spaces we still have rule of law - when xAI started doing the deepfake nude thing we kind of knew no one in the US would do anything but jurisdictions like the EU would. And they are now. It's happening slowly but it is happening. Here though, I just don't know if there's any institution in the US that is going to look at this for what it is - an unsafe system not ready for the road - and take action.
> the deepfake nude thing
the issue is that these tools are widely accessible, and at the federal level, the legal liability is on the person who posts it, not who hosts the tool. this was a mistake that will likely be corrected over the next six years
due to the current regulatory environment (trump admin), there is no political will to tackle new laws.
> I just don't know if there's any institution in the US that is going to look at this for what it is - an unsafe system not ready for the road - and take action.
unlike deepfakes, there are extensive road safety laws and civil liability precedent. texas may be pushing tesla forward (maybe partially for ideological reasons), but it will be an extremely hard sell to get any of the major US cities to get on board with this.
so, no, i don't think you will see robotaxis on the roads in blue states (or even most red states) any time soon.
> legal liability is on the person who posts it, not who hosts the tool.
In the specific case of grok posting deepfake nudes on X. Doesn't X both create and post the deepfake?
My understanding was, Bob replies in Alice's thread, "@grok make a nude photo of Alice" then grok replies in the thread with the fake photo.
That specific action is still instigated by Bob.
Where grok is at risk is not responding after they are notified of the issue. It’s trivial for grock to ban some keywords here and they aren’t, that’s a legal issue.
Sure Bob is instigating the harassment, then X.com is actually doing the harassment. Or at least, that's the case plaintiff's attorneys are surely going to be arguing.
Just because someone tells you to produce child pornography you don't have to do it just because you are able to. Other model providers don't have the problem...
that is an ethical and business problem, not entirely a legal problem (currently). hopefully, it will universally be a legal problem in the near future, though.
and frankly, anyone paying grok (regardless of their use of it) is contributing to the problem
It's only an ethics and business problem if the produced images are purely synthetic and in most jurisdictions even that is questionable. Grok produced child pornography of real children which is a legal problem.
>and at the federal level, the legal liability is on the person who posts it, not who hosts the tool. this was a mistake that will likely be corrected over the next six years
[citation needed]
Historically hosts have always absolutely been responsible for the materials they host, see DMCA law, CSAM case law...
no offense but you completely misinterpreted what i wrote. i didnt say who hosts the materials, i said who hosts the tool. i didnt mention anything about the platform, which is a very relevant but separate party.
if you think i said otherwise, please quote me, thank you.
> Historically hosts have always absolutely been responsible for the materials they host,
[citation needed] :) go read up on section 230.
for example with dmca, liability arises if the host acts in bad faith, generates the infringing content itself, or fails to act on a takedown notice
that is quite some distance from "always absolutely". in fact, it's the whole point of 230
>it's difficult to draw statistical comparisons [...] because there's so little data
Getting this to a place where it is better than humans continuously is not equivalent to fixing bugs in the context of the production of software used on phones etc.
When you are dealing with a dynamic uncontained environment it is much more difficult.
Waymo is in a place where it's better than humans continuously. If Tesla is not, that's on them, either because their engineers are not as good or because they're forced to follow Elon's camera-only mandate.
It's the camera-only mandate, and it's not Elon's but Karpathy's.
Any engineering student can understand why LIDAR+Radar+RGB is better than just a single camera; and any person moderately aware of tech can realize that digital cameras are nowhere as good as the human eye.
But yeah, he's a genius or something.
Digital cameras are much worse than the human eye, especially when it comes to dynamic range, but I don't think that's all that widely known actually. There are also better and worse digital cameras, and the ones on a Waymo are very good, and the ones on a Tesla aren't that great, and that makes a huge difference.
Beyond even the cameras themselves, humans can move their head around, use sun visors, put on sunglasses, etc to deal with driving into the sun, but AVs don't have these capabilities yet.
> especially when it comes to dynamic range
You can solve this by having multiple cameras for each vantage point, with different sensors and lenses that are optimized for different light levels. Tesla isn't doing this mind you, but with the use of multiple cameras, it should be easy enough to exceed the dynamic range of the human eye so long as you are auto-selecting whichever camera is getting you the correct exposure at any given point.
I have enjoyed Karpathy's educational materials over the years, but somehow missed that he was involved with Tesla to this degree. This was a very insightful comment from 9 years ago on the topic:
> What this really reflects is that Tesla has painted itself into a corner. They've shipped vehicles with a weak sensor suite that's claimed to be sufficient to support self-driving, leaving the software for later. Tesla, unlike everybody else who's serious, doesn't have a LIDAR.
> Now, it's "later", their software demos are about where Google was in 2010, and Tesla has a big problem. This is a really hard problem to do with cameras alone. Deep learning is useful, but it's not magic, and it's not strong AI. No wonder their head of automatic driving quit. Karpathy may bail in a few months, once he realizes he's joined a death march.
Karpathy left in 2022. Turns out that the commenter, Animats, is John Nagle!
Using only cameras is a business decision, not tech decision: will camera + NN be good enough before LIDAR+Radar+RGB+NN can scale up.
For me it looks like they will reach parity at about the same time, so camera only is not totally stupid. What's stupid is forcing robotaxi on the road before the technology is ready.
Clearly they have not reached parity, as evidenced by the crash rate of Tesla.
It's far from clear that the current HW4 + sensor suite will ever be sufficient for L4.
>reach parity at about the same time
Nah, Waymo is much safer than Tesla today, while Tesla has way-mo* data to train on and much more compute capacity in their hands. They're in a dead end.
Camera-only was a massive mistake. They'll never admit to that because there's now millions of cars out there that will be perceived as defective if they do. This is the decision that will sink Tesla to the ground, you'll see. But hail Karpathy, yeah.
* Sorry, I couldn't resist.
It's clear that camera-only driving is getting better as we have better image understanding models every year. So there will be a point when camera based systems without lidars will get better than human drivers.
Technology is just not there yet, and Elon is impatient.
Then stop deploying camera only systems until that time comes.
Waymo could be working on camera only. I don’t know. But it’s not controlling the car. And until such a time they can prove with their data that it is just as safe, that seems like a very smart decision.
Tesla is not taking such a cautious approach. And they’re doing it on public roads. That’s the problem.
Lidar and radar will also get better and having all possible sensors will always out perform camera only.
> So there will be a point when camera based systems without lidars will get better than human drivers.
No reason to assume that. A toddler that is increasing in walk speed every month will never be able to outrun a cheetah.
in contrast, a toddler equipped with an ion thruster & a modest quantity of xeon propellant could achieve enough delta-v to attain cheetah-escape velocity, provided the initial trajectory during the first 31 hours of the mission was through a low-cheetah-density environment
> it's kind of wild that a couple of those crashes would've been easily preventable with parking sensors that come equipped as standard on almost every other car
Teslas are really cheaply made, inadequate cars by modern standards. The interiors are terrible and are barebones even compared to mainstream cars like a Toyota Corolla. And they lack parking sensors depending on the version you bought. I believe current models don’t come with a surround view camera either, which is almost standard on all cars at this point, and very useful in practice. I guess I am not surprised the Robotaxis are also barebones.
electrec as always.
```
The incidents included a collision with a fixed object at 17 miles per hour, a crash with a bus while the Tesla vehicle was stopped, a crash with a truck at four miles per hour, and two cases where Tesla vehicles backed into fixed objects at low speeds.
```
so in reality one crash with fixed object, the rest is... questionable, and it's not a crash as you portrait. Such statistic will not even go into human reports, as it goes into non driving incidents, parking lot etc.
Interesting crash list. A bunch of low speed crashes, one bus hit the Tesla while the Tesla was stationary, and one 17mph into static object (ouch).
For those complaining about Tesla's redactions - fair and good. That said, Tesla formed its media strategy at a time when gas car companies and shorts bought ENTIRE MEDIA ORGs just to trash them to back their short. Their hopefulness about a good showing on the media side died with Clarkson and co faking dead batteries in a roadster test -- so, yes, they're paranoid, but also, they spent years with everyone out to get them.
Which media org was bought for this?
Are you being sarcastic due to Elon buying Twitter to own/control the conversation? He would be a poster child for the bad actions you are describing.
What media company did Ford buy? What about Honda? Or Toyota? On the flip side, I can think of a very specific media site the Elon purchased.
It does not reflect well on Tesla to have failed to update their media structure now that EVs are everywhere and no longer a threat to existing car companies.
EV's are even bigger threat now if you outside regulated bubble in US. everywhere else, china dominates the market with cheaper and cheaper EV's, while EU/US automakers fail to compete. replace tesla with china.
It's funny how one can see a persecuted underdog in a company that claimed full self driving (coast to coast) almost a decade ago and had not delivered anything close until just last year. I wonder how the folks who bought their "appreciating asset"[1] in 2019 feel about their cars' current value.
Yeah, you can get a used Tesla for a bag of chips where I am ... and I still wouldn't buy one.
I'm not an Elon fan at all, and I'm highly skeptical of Tesla's robotaxi efforts in general, but the context here is that only one of these seems like a true crash?
I'm curious how crashes are reported for humans, because it sounds like 3 of the 5 examples listed happened at like 1-4 mph, and the fourth probably wasn't Tesla's fault (it was stationary at the time). The most damning one was a collision with a fixed object at a whopping 17 mph.
Tesla sucks, but this feels like clickbait.
To be fair, the article calls that out specifically at the end:
> What makes this especially frustrating is the lack of transparency. Every other ADS company in the NHTSA database, Waymo, Zoox, Aurora, Nuro, provides detailed narratives explaining what happened in each crash. Tesla redacts everything. We cannot independently assess whether Tesla’s system was at fault, whether the safety monitor failed to intervene in time, or *whether these were unavoidable situations caused by other road users*. Tesla wants us to trust its safety record while making it impossible to verify.
Agreed. The "Tesla backed into objects, one into a pole or tree at 1 mph and another into a fixed object at 2 mph" stood out to me in specific. There is no way that any human driver is going to report backing into something at 1 or 2 mph.
While I was living in NYC I saw collisions of that nature all the time. People put a "bumper buddy" on their car because the street parallel parking is so tight and folks "bump" the car behind them while trying to get out.
My guess is that at least 3 of those "collisions" are things that would never be reported with a human driver.
This is with safety drivers. So at this point you can't really make any conclusions about how good the Robotaxi is at avoiding major crashes since those should ideally be handled by the safety drivers. Without the actual data around all driver interventions you cannot make any positive conclusions about safety here.
My suspicion is that these kinds of minor crashes are simply harder to catch for safety drivers, or maybe the safety drivers did intervene here and slow down the car before the crashes. I don't know if that would show in this data.
Low mph does not automatically imply that crashes are not serious. It does not say anything about speed of other vehicles. Tesla could be creeping at 2mph into flow of traffic, or it could come at a complete stop after doing that and still be the reason of an accident.
If you routinely hit other objects, even at 1-4 mph, you are not a good driver.
The average driver also likely hits objects at 1-4 mph at more than 4x the rate they hit things at a severity high enough to generate a police report.
So the average driver is also likely a bad driver by your standard. Your standard seems reasonable.
The data is inconclusive on whether Tesla robotaxi is worse than the average driver.
Unlike humans, Waymo does report 1-4 mph collisions. The data is very conclusive that Robotaxi is significantly worse than Waymo.
Doesn't matter if you're doing 4mph moving into an intersection where cross traffic is doing 35 or more.
Is there any place online to read the incident reports? For example Waymo in CA there's a gov page to read them, I read 9 of them and they were all not at the fault of Waymo, so I'm wondering how many of these crashes are similar (ie at a red light and someone rear ends them)
No, TSLA purposely does not list the details of the incident.
It's impressive how bad they're at hiring the safety drivers. This is not even measuring how good the Robotaxi itself is, right now it's only measuring how good Tesla is at running this kind of test. This is not inspiring any confidence.
Though maybe the safety drivers are good enough for the major stuff, and the software is just bad enough at low speed and low distance collisions where the drivers don't notice as easily that the car is doing something wrong before it happens.
He going to fix this by having grok redefine "widespread"
Tesla CEO Elon Musk said at the World Economic Forum in Davos that the company’s robotaxis will be “widespread” in the U.S. by the end of 2026.
Their service is way worse than you think, in every way. The actual unsupervised Robotaxi service doesn't cover a geofenced area of Austin, like Waymo does. It traverses a fixed route along South Congress Avenue, like a damned bus.
ill stick to the bus
One of the Robotaxi “crashes” was actually a moving bus colliding into a stationary Robotaxi.
That's even more convincing. I wouldn't want to be in the RoboTaxi that's getting hit by a bus
"Tesla remains the only ADS operator to systematically hide crash details from the public through NHTSA’s confidentiality provisions."
Given the way Musk has lied and lied about Tesla's autonomous driving capabilities, that can't be much of a surprise to anyone.
Well, how about time to take them off the roads then?
It's a fusion of jazz and funk!
At this point, I am really sick of both Elon supporters and Elon haters, coverage of Elon's companies either good or bad (as it's always incredibly biased in either direction), and sick of both the current trend of hyper optimism and hyper doomerism.
I know that it is irrational to expect any kind of balance or any kind of objective analysis, but things are so polarized that I often feel the world is going insane.
You know what's insane? When Musk and his underage edgelords were breaking down the doors of government buildings, installing rootkits, and illegally exfiltrating data; when he "took a chainsaw" to USAID and directly caused the deaths of thousands of people in the third world; when he explicitly posted and retweeted white nationalist rhetoric straight from the pages of Stormfront; and yet tech people kept talking about him like a *totally normal CEO*, not one of the most despicable people in Western politics. Someday he'll end up in a well-deserved dungeon and everyone will pretend to never have supported him.
This data seems very incomplete and potentially misleading.
>The new crashes include [...] a crash with a bus while the Tesla was stationary
Doesn't this imply that the bus driver hit the stationary Tesla, which would make the human bus driver at fault and the party responsible for causing the accident? Why should a human driver hitting a Tesla be counted against Tesla's safety record?
It's possible that the Tesla could've been stopped in a place where it shouldn't have, like in the middle of an intersection (like all the Waymos did during the SF power outage), but there aren't details being shared about each of these incidents by Electrek.
>The new crashes include [...] a collision with a heavy truck at 4 mph
The chart shows only that the Tesla was driving straight at 4mph when this happened, not whether the Tesla hit the truck or the truck hit the Tesla.
Again, it's entirely possible that the Tesla hit the truck, but why aren't these details being shared? This seems like important data to consider when evaluating the safety of autonomous systems - whether the autonomous system or human error was to blame for the accident.
I appreciate that Electrek at least gives a mention of this dynamic:
>Tesla fans and shareholders hold on to the thought that the company’s robotaxis are not responsible for some of these crashes, which is true, even though that’s much harder to determine with Tesla redacting the crash narrative on all crashes, but the problem is that even Tesla’s own benchmark shows humans have fewer crashes.
Aren't these crash details / "crash narrative" a matter of public record and investigations? By e.g. either NHTSA, or by local law enforcement? If not, shouldn't it be? Why should we, as a society, rely on the automaker as the sole source of information about what caused accidents with experimental new driverless vehicles? That seems like a poor public policy choice.
Just imagine how bad it is going to be when they take the human driver out of the car.
No idea how these things are being allowed on the road. Oh wait, yes I do. $$$$
Just take these fucking things off the road. "Robotaxi" needs to die in same fashion as predecessor, Cruise.
[flagged]
The source is legally mandated reporting to the government.
Elecktek is just summarizing/commenting.
[flagged]
It's amazing how well Waymo functions as a shibboleth for people who don't understand how these systems work. Waymo's remote assistants provide high level guidance, they're not part of the control loop.
Supposedly neither are Tesla's remote assistants, though there are open questions about why they've posted job descriptions about building a teleop system for their vehicles [0] and why their remote assistant setups have steering wheels if that's completely true.
4x worse than humans is misleading, I bet it's better than humans, by a good margin.
I agree, and not in defense of Tesla but a 1mph collision while backing is something most human drivers are not going to report anywhere. That's why most cars have little scrapes and scratches on the bumpers and doors. Tesla should be more forthcoming with the full narrative of these incidents though.
Good, who cares. Autonomous driving is an absolute waste of time. We need autodrone transport for civilian traffic. The skies have been waiting.
It is important to note that this is with safety drivers. Professional driver + their most advanced "Robotaxi" FSD version under test with careful scrutiny is 4x worse than the average non-professional driver alone and averaging 57,000 miles per minor collision.
Yet it is quite odd how Tesla also reports that untrained customers using old versions of FSD with outdated hardware average 1,500,000 miles per minor collision [1], a literal 3000% difference, when there are no penalties for incorrect reporting.
[1] https://www.tesla.com/fsd/safety
Robotaxi supevision is just an emergency brake switch.
Consumer supervision is having all the controls of the car right there in front of you. And if you are doing it right, you have your hands on wheel and foot on the pedals ready to jump in.
> Robotaxi supevision is just an emergency brake switch
That was the case when they first started the trial in Austin. The employee in the car was a safety monitor sitting in the front passenger seat with an emergency brake button.
Later, when they started expanding the service area to include highways they moved them to the driver seat on those trips so that they can completely take over if something unsafe is happening.
Nah the relevant factor, which has been obvious to anyone who cared to think about this stuff honestly for years, is that Tesla's safety claims on FSD are meaningless.
Accident rates under cruise control are also extremely below average.
Why?
Because people use cruise control (and FSD) under specific conditions. Namely: good ones! Ones where accidents already happen at a way below-average rate!
Tesla has always been able to publish the data required to really understand performance, which would be normalized by age of vehicle and driving conditions. But they have not, for reasons that have always been obvious but are absolutely undeniable now.
That just makes the Robotaxi even more irresponsible.
I think they were so used to defending Autopilot that they got confused.
To be fair to Tesla and other self driving taxis, urban and shorter journeys usually have worse collision rates than the average journey - and FSD is likely to be owners driving themselves to work etc.
Great, we can use Tesla's own numbers once again by selecting non-highway. Average human is 178,000 non-highway miles per minor collision resulting in "Professional Driver + Most Advanced 'Robotaxi' FSD version under test with careful scrutiny" at 3x worse than the average non-professional driver alone.
They advertise and market a safety claim of 986,000 non-highway miles per minor collision. They are claiming, risking the lives of their customers, that their objectively inferior product with objectively worse deployment controls is 1,700% better than their most advanced product under careful controls and scrutiny when there are no penalties for incorrect reporting.
It is kind of comparing apples to oranges. The more appropriate would be to compare it with other Taxis.
https://www.rubensteinandrynecki.com/brooklyn/taxi-accident-...
Generally about 1 accident per 217k miles. Which still means that Tesla is having accidents at a 4x rate. However, there may be underreporting and that could be the source of the difference. Also, the safety drivers may have prevented a lot of accidents too.
The problem Tesla faces and their investors are unaware of, is that just because you have a Modey Y that has driven you around for thousands of miles without incident does not mean Tesla has autonomous driving solved.
Tesla needs their FSD system to be driving hundreds of thousands of miles without incident. Not the 5,000 miles Michael FSD-is-awesome-I-use-it-daily Smith posts incessantly on X about.
There is this mismatch where overly represented people who champion FSD say it's great and has no issues, and the reality is none of them are remotely close to putting in enough miles to cross the "it's safe to deploy" threshold.
A fleet of robotaxis will do more FSD miles in an afternoon than your average Tesla fanatic will do in a decade. I can promise you that Elon was sweating hard during each of the few unsupervised rides they have offered.
> hundreds of thousands of miles without incident
Almost there. Humans kill one person every 100 million miles driven. To reach mass adoption, self-driving car need to kill one every, say, billion miles. Which means dozens or hundreds of billions miles driven to reach statistical significance.
> to reach mass adoption, self-driving car need to kill one every, say, billion miles
They need to be around parity. So a death every 100mm miles or so. The number of folks who want radically more safety are about balanced by those who want a product in market quicker.
Tesla's Robotaxis are bringing a bad name to the entire field of autonomous driving. The average consumer isn't going to make a distinction between Tesla vs. Waymo. When they hear about these Robotaxi crashes, they will assume all robotic driving is crash prone, dangerous and irresponsible.
> The average consumer isn't going to make a distinction between Tesla vs. Waymo.
I think they do. That's the whole point of brand value.
Even my non-tech friends seem to know that with self-driving, Waymo is safe and Tesla is not.
Yep. Especially when one of the brands is Tesla.
Once Elon put himself at the epicenter of American political life, Tesla stopped being treated as a brand, and more a placeholder for Elon himself.
Waymo has excellent branding and first to market advantage in defining how self-driving is perceived by users. But, the alternative being Elon's Tesla further widens the perception gap.
I think the Tesla brand and the Elon brand have always been attached at the hip. This was fine when the Elon brand was "eccentric founder who likes memes, wants to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels, and plans to launch a Mars colony." It only became a marketing problem when he went down the right wing rabbit hole and started sieg heiling on stage.
I really don't think that's true. Think Uber vs. Lyft. I know I distinguish between the two even if the experience is usually about the same and people I know where this has come up in conversation generally see Lyft as "off-brand" and a little more skeevy. They only take Lyfts when it's cheaper or quicker than Uber.
I'm probably not the average consumer in this situation but I was in Austin recently and took both Waymo and Robotaxi. I significantly preferred the Waymo experience. It felt far more integrated and... complete? It also felt very safe (it avoided getting into an accident in a circumstance where I certainly would have crashed).
I hope Tesla gets their act together so that the autonomous taxi market can engage in real price discovery instead of "same price as an Uber but you don't have to tip." Surely it's lower than that especially as more and more of these vehicles get onto the road.
Unrelated to driving ability but related to the brand discussion: that graffiti font Tesla uses for Cybertruck and Robotaxi is SO ugly and cringey. That alone gives me a slight aversion.
I’m not so sure. I think Tesla is so tied up in Musk’s personality that Tesla and Waymo aren’t in the same field, likewise with Optimus. Tesla isn’t self-driving, it is Tesla. Especially now that many mainstream vehicles ship with various levels of self-driving, a lot of people have a lot of exposure to it. Tesla has the best brand recognition but they no longer define the product. Tesla is Tesla, Waymo is self-driving.
Most people are able to be more nuanced than your typical hn zealot. They strongly dislike Musk, but are begrudgingly able to give credit where credit is due wrt Tesla, SpaceX, etc.
yes, I talk to people and they have confidence in tesla. But then I mention that waymo is level 4 and tesla is level 2, and it doesn't make any difference.
I don't know what a clear/direct way of explaining the difference would be.
Yep, feels a lot like that submarine that got crushed trying to get to the Titanic a year or two ago. It made the entire marine industry look worse, and other companies making submarines were concerned it would hurt their business.
Inb4: not remotely in the marine field, so a genuine question. Would it really make an impact?
Robotaxis market is much broader than the submersibles one, so the effect of consumers' irrationality would be much bigger there. I'd expect an average customer of the submarines market to do quite a bit more research on what they're getting into.
Having the whole world meming on rich dudes in submarines could plausibly make the whole industry seem less cool to people with the money to buy even a good submarine. Imagine being a rich dude with a new submarine and everybody you talk to about it snickers about you getting crushed like Stockton. Maybe you'd just buy a bigger yacht and skip the submarine, which you were probably only buying for the cool factor in the first place...
The difference is the OceanGate Titan failure only harmed those who didn't do their due diligence and the grossly negligent owner. The risk was contained to those who explicitly opted in. In this case, Tesla Robotaxis harm others to keep Tesla's valuation and share price propped up. The performance art is the investor relations.
This is actually a rational explanation for this. Perhaps Elon wants to sink the whole industry until he can actually build a self driving car like Waymo's.
He wants to break trust in the whole industry by giving Tesla a massive black eye, undoubtedly hurting their stock and sales significantly, in order to, later, create actual self driving cars into the market that he's already poisoned?
Totally rational.
Elon's drug addled brain doesn't make rational decisions.
Well, admittedly maybe I should have said "rational to Elon on Ketamine"
> are bringing a bad name to the entire field of autonomous driving.
A small number of humans bring a bad name to the entire field of regular driving.
> The average consumer isn't going to make a distinction between Tesla vs. Waymo.
What's actually "distinct?" The secret sauce of their code? It always amazed me that corporate giants were willing to compete over cab rides. It sort of makes me feel, tongue in cheek, that they have fully run out of ideas.
> they will assume all robotic driving is crash prone
The difference in failure modes between regular driving and autonomous driving is stark. Many consumers feel the overall compromise is unviable even if the error rates between providers are different.
Watching a Waymo drive into oncoming traffic, pull over, and hear a tech support voice talk to you over the nav system is quite the experience. You can have zero crashes, but if your users end up in this scenario, they're not going to appreciate the difference.
They're not investors. They're just people who have somewhere to go. They don't _care_ about "the field". Nor should they.
> dangerous and irresponsible.
These are, in fact, pilot programs. Why this lede always gets buried is beyond me. Instead of accepting the data and incorporating it into the world view here, people just want to wave their hands and dissemble over how difficult this problem _actually_ is.
Hacker News has always assumed this problem is easy. It is not.
> Hacker News has always assumed this problem is easy. It is not.
That’s the problem right there.
It’s EXTREMELY hard.
Waymo has very carefully increased its abilities, tip-toeing forward little by little until after all this time they’ve achieved the abilities they have with great safety numbers.
Tesla appears to continuously make big jumps they seem totally unprepared for yelling “YOLO” and then expect to be treated the same when it doesn’t work out by saying “but it’s hard.”
I have zero respect for how they’ve approached this since day 1 of autopilot and think what they’re doing is flat out dangerous.
So yeah. Some of us call them out. A lot. And they seem to keep providing evidence we may be right.
I’ve often felt that much of the crowd touting how close the problem was to being solved was conflating a driving problem to just being a perception problem. Perception is just a sub-space of the driving problem.
Genuine question though: has Waymo gotten better at their reporting? A couple years back they seemingly inflated their safety numbers by sanitizing the classifications with subjective “a human would have crashed too so we don’t count it as an accident”. That is measuring something quite different than how safety numbers are colloquially interpreted.
It seems like there is a need for more standardized testing and reporting, but I may be out of the loop.
> achieved the abilities they have with great safety numbers.
Driving around in good weather and never on freeways is not much of an achievement. Having vehicles that continually interfere in active medical and police cordons isn't particularly safe, even though there haven't been terrible consequences from it, yet.
If all you're doing is observing a single number you're drastically under prepared for what happens when they expand this program beyond these paltry self imposed limits.
> Some of us call them out.
You should be working to get their certificate pulled at the government level. If this program is so dangerous then why wouldn't you do that?
> And they seem to keep providing evidence we may be right.
It's tragic you can't apply the same logic in isolation to Waymo.
Freeways are far easier for a robot to drive on than streets. Driving on freeways would significantly lower Waymo's accident per mile rate.
The difference is that accidents on a freeway are far more likely to be fatal than accidents on a city street.
Waymo didn't avoid freeways because they were hard, they avoided them because they were dangerous.
Freeway accidents, due to their nature, are a lot harder to ignore and underreport than accidentally bumping or scraping into another car at low speeds. It's like using murder rates to estimate real crime rates because murders, unlike most other crimes, are far more likely to be properly documented.
Waymo started rolling out freeway trips in some cities late last year
Waymo overall has a FANTASTIC safety record and has been improving steadily. You can't say the same about Tesla's FSD and Robotaxi.
LIDAR gives Waymo a fundamental advantage.
Elon definitely has this cult of personality around him where people will jump in and defend his companies (as a stand-in for him) on the internet, even in the face of some common sense observations. I don't get the sense that anything you've said is particularly reasonable outside of being lured in by Elon's personality.
This is absolutely true. There is a flip side however, where people who dislike Elon Musk will sometimes talk up his competitors, seemingly for no good reason other than them being at least nominally competitors to Musk companies. Nikola and Spinlaunch are two that come to mind; quite blatant scams that have gotten far too much attention because they aren't Musk companies.
Tesla FSD is crap. But I also think we wouldn't see quite so much praise of Waymo unless Tesla also had aspirations in this domain. Genuinely, what is so great about a robo taxi even if it works well? Do people really hate immigrants this much?
I said in earlier reports about this, it's difficult to draw statistical comparisons with humans because there's so little data. Having said that, it is clear that this system just isn't ready and it's kind of wild that a couple of those crashes would've been easily preventable with parking sensors that come equipped as standard on almost every other car.
In some spaces we still have rule of law - when xAI started doing the deepfake nude thing we kind of knew no one in the US would do anything but jurisdictions like the EU would. And they are now. It's happening slowly but it is happening. Here though, I just don't know if there's any institution in the US that is going to look at this for what it is - an unsafe system not ready for the road - and take action.
> the deepfake nude thing
the issue is that these tools are widely accessible, and at the federal level, the legal liability is on the person who posts it, not who hosts the tool. this was a mistake that will likely be corrected over the next six years
due to the current regulatory environment (trump admin), there is no political will to tackle new laws.
> I just don't know if there's any institution in the US that is going to look at this for what it is - an unsafe system not ready for the road - and take action.
unlike deepfakes, there are extensive road safety laws and civil liability precedent. texas may be pushing tesla forward (maybe partially for ideological reasons), but it will be an extremely hard sell to get any of the major US cities to get on board with this.
so, no, i don't think you will see robotaxis on the roads in blue states (or even most red states) any time soon.
> legal liability is on the person who posts it, not who hosts the tool.
In the specific case of grok posting deepfake nudes on X. Doesn't X both create and post the deepfake?
My understanding was, Bob replies in Alice's thread, "@grok make a nude photo of Alice" then grok replies in the thread with the fake photo.
That specific action is still instigated by Bob.
Where grok is at risk is not responding after they are notified of the issue. It’s trivial for grock to ban some keywords here and they aren’t, that’s a legal issue.
Sure Bob is instigating the harassment, then X.com is actually doing the harassment. Or at least, that's the case plaintiff's attorneys are surely going to be arguing.
Just because someone tells you to produce child pornography you don't have to do it just because you are able to. Other model providers don't have the problem...
that is an ethical and business problem, not entirely a legal problem (currently). hopefully, it will universally be a legal problem in the near future, though. and frankly, anyone paying grok (regardless of their use of it) is contributing to the problem
It's only an ethics and business problem if the produced images are purely synthetic and in most jurisdictions even that is questionable. Grok produced child pornography of real children which is a legal problem.
>and at the federal level, the legal liability is on the person who posts it, not who hosts the tool. this was a mistake that will likely be corrected over the next six years
[citation needed]
Historically hosts have always absolutely been responsible for the materials they host, see DMCA law, CSAM case law...
no offense but you completely misinterpreted what i wrote. i didnt say who hosts the materials, i said who hosts the tool. i didnt mention anything about the platform, which is a very relevant but separate party.
if you think i said otherwise, please quote me, thank you.
> Historically hosts have always absolutely been responsible for the materials they host,
[citation needed] :) go read up on section 230.
for example with dmca, liability arises if the host acts in bad faith, generates the infringing content itself, or fails to act on a takedown notice
that is quite some distance from "always absolutely". in fact, it's the whole point of 230
>it's difficult to draw statistical comparisons [...] because there's so little data
That ain't true [1].
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisher%27s_exact_test
Its not ever going to get ready.
Getting this to a place where it is better than humans continuously is not equivalent to fixing bugs in the context of the production of software used on phones etc.
When you are dealing with a dynamic uncontained environment it is much more difficult.
Waymo is in a place where it's better than humans continuously. If Tesla is not, that's on them, either because their engineers are not as good or because they're forced to follow Elon's camera-only mandate.
It's the camera-only mandate, and it's not Elon's but Karpathy's.
Any engineering student can understand why LIDAR+Radar+RGB is better than just a single camera; and any person moderately aware of tech can realize that digital cameras are nowhere as good as the human eye.
But yeah, he's a genius or something.
Digital cameras are much worse than the human eye, especially when it comes to dynamic range, but I don't think that's all that widely known actually. There are also better and worse digital cameras, and the ones on a Waymo are very good, and the ones on a Tesla aren't that great, and that makes a huge difference.
Beyond even the cameras themselves, humans can move their head around, use sun visors, put on sunglasses, etc to deal with driving into the sun, but AVs don't have these capabilities yet.
> especially when it comes to dynamic range
You can solve this by having multiple cameras for each vantage point, with different sensors and lenses that are optimized for different light levels. Tesla isn't doing this mind you, but with the use of multiple cameras, it should be easy enough to exceed the dynamic range of the human eye so long as you are auto-selecting whichever camera is getting you the correct exposure at any given point.
I have enjoyed Karpathy's educational materials over the years, but somehow missed that he was involved with Tesla to this degree. This was a very insightful comment from 9 years ago on the topic:
> What this really reflects is that Tesla has painted itself into a corner. They've shipped vehicles with a weak sensor suite that's claimed to be sufficient to support self-driving, leaving the software for later. Tesla, unlike everybody else who's serious, doesn't have a LIDAR.
> Now, it's "later", their software demos are about where Google was in 2010, and Tesla has a big problem. This is a really hard problem to do with cameras alone. Deep learning is useful, but it's not magic, and it's not strong AI. No wonder their head of automatic driving quit. Karpathy may bail in a few months, once he realizes he's joined a death march.
> ...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14600924
Karpathy left in 2022. Turns out that the commenter, Animats, is John Nagle!
Using only cameras is a business decision, not tech decision: will camera + NN be good enough before LIDAR+Radar+RGB+NN can scale up.
For me it looks like they will reach parity at about the same time, so camera only is not totally stupid. What's stupid is forcing robotaxi on the road before the technology is ready.
Clearly they have not reached parity, as evidenced by the crash rate of Tesla.
It's far from clear that the current HW4 + sensor suite will ever be sufficient for L4.
>reach parity at about the same time
Nah, Waymo is much safer than Tesla today, while Tesla has way-mo* data to train on and much more compute capacity in their hands. They're in a dead end.
Camera-only was a massive mistake. They'll never admit to that because there's now millions of cars out there that will be perceived as defective if they do. This is the decision that will sink Tesla to the ground, you'll see. But hail Karpathy, yeah.
* Sorry, I couldn't resist.
It's clear that camera-only driving is getting better as we have better image understanding models every year. So there will be a point when camera based systems without lidars will get better than human drivers.
Technology is just not there yet, and Elon is impatient.
Then stop deploying camera only systems until that time comes.
Waymo could be working on camera only. I don’t know. But it’s not controlling the car. And until such a time they can prove with their data that it is just as safe, that seems like a very smart decision.
Tesla is not taking such a cautious approach. And they’re doing it on public roads. That’s the problem.
Lidar and radar will also get better and having all possible sensors will always out perform camera only.
> So there will be a point when camera based systems without lidars will get better than human drivers.
No reason to assume that. A toddler that is increasing in walk speed every month will never be able to outrun a cheetah.
in contrast, a toddler equipped with an ion thruster & a modest quantity of xeon propellant could achieve enough delta-v to attain cheetah-escape velocity, provided the initial trajectory during the first 31 hours of the mission was through a low-cheetah-density environment
> it's kind of wild that a couple of those crashes would've been easily preventable with parking sensors that come equipped as standard on almost every other car
Teslas are really cheaply made, inadequate cars by modern standards. The interiors are terrible and are barebones even compared to mainstream cars like a Toyota Corolla. And they lack parking sensors depending on the version you bought. I believe current models don’t come with a surround view camera either, which is almost standard on all cars at this point, and very useful in practice. I guess I am not surprised the Robotaxis are also barebones.
electrec as always.
``` The incidents included a collision with a fixed object at 17 miles per hour, a crash with a bus while the Tesla vehicle was stopped, a crash with a truck at four miles per hour, and two cases where Tesla vehicles backed into fixed objects at low speeds. ```
so in reality one crash with fixed object, the rest is... questionable, and it's not a crash as you portrait. Such statistic will not even go into human reports, as it goes into non driving incidents, parking lot etc.
Interesting crash list. A bunch of low speed crashes, one bus hit the Tesla while the Tesla was stationary, and one 17mph into static object (ouch).
For those complaining about Tesla's redactions - fair and good. That said, Tesla formed its media strategy at a time when gas car companies and shorts bought ENTIRE MEDIA ORGs just to trash them to back their short. Their hopefulness about a good showing on the media side died with Clarkson and co faking dead batteries in a roadster test -- so, yes, they're paranoid, but also, they spent years with everyone out to get them.
Which media org was bought for this?
Are you being sarcastic due to Elon buying Twitter to own/control the conversation? He would be a poster child for the bad actions you are describing.
What media company did Ford buy? What about Honda? Or Toyota? On the flip side, I can think of a very specific media site the Elon purchased.
It does not reflect well on Tesla to have failed to update their media structure now that EVs are everywhere and no longer a threat to existing car companies.
EV's are even bigger threat now if you outside regulated bubble in US. everywhere else, china dominates the market with cheaper and cheaper EV's, while EU/US automakers fail to compete. replace tesla with china.
It's funny how one can see a persecuted underdog in a company that claimed full self driving (coast to coast) almost a decade ago and had not delivered anything close until just last year. I wonder how the folks who bought their "appreciating asset"[1] in 2019 feel about their cars' current value.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/musks-claim-teslas-appreciat...
Yeah, you can get a used Tesla for a bag of chips where I am ... and I still wouldn't buy one.
I'm not an Elon fan at all, and I'm highly skeptical of Tesla's robotaxi efforts in general, but the context here is that only one of these seems like a true crash?
I'm curious how crashes are reported for humans, because it sounds like 3 of the 5 examples listed happened at like 1-4 mph, and the fourth probably wasn't Tesla's fault (it was stationary at the time). The most damning one was a collision with a fixed object at a whopping 17 mph.
Tesla sucks, but this feels like clickbait.
To be fair, the article calls that out specifically at the end:
> What makes this especially frustrating is the lack of transparency. Every other ADS company in the NHTSA database, Waymo, Zoox, Aurora, Nuro, provides detailed narratives explaining what happened in each crash. Tesla redacts everything. We cannot independently assess whether Tesla’s system was at fault, whether the safety monitor failed to intervene in time, or *whether these were unavoidable situations caused by other road users*. Tesla wants us to trust its safety record while making it impossible to verify.
Agreed. The "Tesla backed into objects, one into a pole or tree at 1 mph and another into a fixed object at 2 mph" stood out to me in specific. There is no way that any human driver is going to report backing into something at 1 or 2 mph.
While I was living in NYC I saw collisions of that nature all the time. People put a "bumper buddy" on their car because the street parallel parking is so tight and folks "bump" the car behind them while trying to get out.
My guess is that at least 3 of those "collisions" are things that would never be reported with a human driver.
This is with safety drivers. So at this point you can't really make any conclusions about how good the Robotaxi is at avoiding major crashes since those should ideally be handled by the safety drivers. Without the actual data around all driver interventions you cannot make any positive conclusions about safety here.
My suspicion is that these kinds of minor crashes are simply harder to catch for safety drivers, or maybe the safety drivers did intervene here and slow down the car before the crashes. I don't know if that would show in this data.
Low mph does not automatically imply that crashes are not serious. It does not say anything about speed of other vehicles. Tesla could be creeping at 2mph into flow of traffic, or it could come at a complete stop after doing that and still be the reason of an accident.
If you routinely hit other objects, even at 1-4 mph, you are not a good driver.
The average driver also likely hits objects at 1-4 mph at more than 4x the rate they hit things at a severity high enough to generate a police report.
So the average driver is also likely a bad driver by your standard. Your standard seems reasonable.
The data is inconclusive on whether Tesla robotaxi is worse than the average driver.
Unlike humans, Waymo does report 1-4 mph collisions. The data is very conclusive that Robotaxi is significantly worse than Waymo.
Doesn't matter if you're doing 4mph moving into an intersection where cross traffic is doing 35 or more.
Is there any place online to read the incident reports? For example Waymo in CA there's a gov page to read them, I read 9 of them and they were all not at the fault of Waymo, so I'm wondering how many of these crashes are similar (ie at a red light and someone rear ends them)
No, TSLA purposely does not list the details of the incident.
It's impressive how bad they're at hiring the safety drivers. This is not even measuring how good the Robotaxi itself is, right now it's only measuring how good Tesla is at running this kind of test. This is not inspiring any confidence.
Though maybe the safety drivers are good enough for the major stuff, and the software is just bad enough at low speed and low distance collisions where the drivers don't notice as easily that the car is doing something wrong before it happens.
He going to fix this by having grok redefine "widespread"
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/22/musk-tesla-robotaxis-us-expa...
Tesla CEO Elon Musk said at the World Economic Forum in Davos that the company’s robotaxis will be “widespread” in the U.S. by the end of 2026.
Their service is way worse than you think, in every way. The actual unsupervised Robotaxi service doesn't cover a geofenced area of Austin, like Waymo does. It traverses a fixed route along South Congress Avenue, like a damned bus.
ill stick to the bus
One of the Robotaxi “crashes” was actually a moving bus colliding into a stationary Robotaxi.
That's even more convincing. I wouldn't want to be in the RoboTaxi that's getting hit by a bus
"Tesla remains the only ADS operator to systematically hide crash details from the public through NHTSA’s confidentiality provisions."
Given the way Musk has lied and lied about Tesla's autonomous driving capabilities, that can't be much of a surprise to anyone.
Well, how about time to take them off the roads then?
It's a fusion of jazz and funk!
At this point, I am really sick of both Elon supporters and Elon haters, coverage of Elon's companies either good or bad (as it's always incredibly biased in either direction), and sick of both the current trend of hyper optimism and hyper doomerism.
I know that it is irrational to expect any kind of balance or any kind of objective analysis, but things are so polarized that I often feel the world is going insane.
You know what's insane? When Musk and his underage edgelords were breaking down the doors of government buildings, installing rootkits, and illegally exfiltrating data; when he "took a chainsaw" to USAID and directly caused the deaths of thousands of people in the third world; when he explicitly posted and retweeted white nationalist rhetoric straight from the pages of Stormfront; and yet tech people kept talking about him like a *totally normal CEO*, not one of the most despicable people in Western politics. Someday he'll end up in a well-deserved dungeon and everyone will pretend to never have supported him.
This data seems very incomplete and potentially misleading.
>The new crashes include [...] a crash with a bus while the Tesla was stationary
Doesn't this imply that the bus driver hit the stationary Tesla, which would make the human bus driver at fault and the party responsible for causing the accident? Why should a human driver hitting a Tesla be counted against Tesla's safety record?
It's possible that the Tesla could've been stopped in a place where it shouldn't have, like in the middle of an intersection (like all the Waymos did during the SF power outage), but there aren't details being shared about each of these incidents by Electrek.
>The new crashes include [...] a collision with a heavy truck at 4 mph
The chart shows only that the Tesla was driving straight at 4mph when this happened, not whether the Tesla hit the truck or the truck hit the Tesla.
Again, it's entirely possible that the Tesla hit the truck, but why aren't these details being shared? This seems like important data to consider when evaluating the safety of autonomous systems - whether the autonomous system or human error was to blame for the accident.
I appreciate that Electrek at least gives a mention of this dynamic:
>Tesla fans and shareholders hold on to the thought that the company’s robotaxis are not responsible for some of these crashes, which is true, even though that’s much harder to determine with Tesla redacting the crash narrative on all crashes, but the problem is that even Tesla’s own benchmark shows humans have fewer crashes.
Aren't these crash details / "crash narrative" a matter of public record and investigations? By e.g. either NHTSA, or by local law enforcement? If not, shouldn't it be? Why should we, as a society, rely on the automaker as the sole source of information about what caused accidents with experimental new driverless vehicles? That seems like a poor public policy choice.
Just imagine how bad it is going to be when they take the human driver out of the car.
No idea how these things are being allowed on the road. Oh wait, yes I do. $$$$
Just take these fucking things off the road. "Robotaxi" needs to die in same fashion as predecessor, Cruise.
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The source is legally mandated reporting to the government.
Elecktek is just summarizing/commenting.
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It's amazing how well Waymo functions as a shibboleth for people who don't understand how these systems work. Waymo's remote assistants provide high level guidance, they're not part of the control loop.
Supposedly neither are Tesla's remote assistants, though there are open questions about why they've posted job descriptions about building a teleop system for their vehicles [0] and why their remote assistant setups have steering wheels if that's completely true.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20241211115851/https://www.tesla...
Move fast and hospitalise people.
A minor fender-bender is not a crash
4x worse than humans is misleading, I bet it's better than humans, by a good margin.
I agree, and not in defense of Tesla but a 1mph collision while backing is something most human drivers are not going to report anywhere. That's why most cars have little scrapes and scratches on the bumpers and doors. Tesla should be more forthcoming with the full narrative of these incidents though.
Good, who cares. Autonomous driving is an absolute waste of time. We need autodrone transport for civilian traffic. The skies have been waiting.
In before, 'but it is a regulation nightmare...'
It is safety, regulatory and noise nightmare.