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Veserv · 4 hours ago
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Yet it is quite odd how Tesla also reports that untrained customers using old versions of FSD with outdated hardware average 1,500,000 miles per minor collision [1], a literal 3000% difference, when there are no penalties for incorrect reporting.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

WarmWash · 4 hours ago
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.

estearum · 3 hours ago
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 traditional 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.

tzs · 4 hours ago
> 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.

everdrive · 2 hours ago
> And if you are doing it right, you have your hands on wheel and foot on the pedals ready to jump in.

Seems like there's zero benefit to this, then. Being required to pay attention, but actually having nothing (ie, driving) to keep my engaged seems like the worst of both worlds. Your attention would constantly be drifting.

strangattractor · 2 hours ago
Similarly Tesla using Teleoperators for their Optimus robots is a safety fake for robots that are not autonomous either. They are constantly trying to cover there inability to make autonomous anything. Cheap lidars or radar would have likely prevented those "hitting stationary objects" accidents. Just because the Furher says it does not make it so.
cma · 3 hours ago
They had supervisors in the passenger seat for a whole but moved them back to the drivers seat, then moved some out to chase cars. In the ones where they are in driver seat they were able to take over the wheel weren't they?
Veserv · 3 hours ago
So the trillion dollar company deployed 1 ton robots in unconstrained public spaces with inadequate safety data and chose to use objectively dangerous and unsafe testing protocols that objectively heightened risk to the public to meet marketing goals? That is worse and would generally be considered utterly depraved self-enrichment.
UltraSane · 4 hours ago
That just makes the Robotaxi even more irresponsible.
helsinkiandrew · 4 hours ago
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.
Veserv · 4 hours ago
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 and the public, 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.

foxyv · 4 hours ago
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.

flutas · 3 hours ago
Yup as context, in the same time Waymo had 101 collisions according to the same NHTSA dataset.
thedougd · 3 hours ago
I would guess the FSD numbers get help from drivers taking over during difficult situations and use weighted towards highway miles?
hwillis · 3 hours ago
not to mention turning off FSD milliseconds before impact

Deleted Comment

cyberax · 2 hours ago
The old FSD was mostly used on freeways that naturally have a much lower incident rate per mile. And a lot of incidents that happen are caused by inattention/fatigue.

So this number is plausible.

sampton · 2 hours ago
I only flip on FSD when on the highway. It has come a long way but still too many problems on local roads.
Arifcodes · 2 hours ago
The comparison to human crash rates needs more context. These low-speed incidents (1-4 mph backing into a fixed object) rarely get reported in human driver statistics because they usually do not involve police reports or injuries. The NHTSA SGO database counts all ADS incidents regardless of severity, while human driver baselines come from reported incidents.

That said, the redaction issue is the real story. Waymo publishes detailed narratives. Zoox publishes detailed narratives. Tesla marks everything confidential. When every other company is transparent and one is not, that tells you something about what they are finding in the data. You cannot independently assess fault or system failure, which makes any comparison meaningless.

WarmWash · 4 hours ago
The problem Tesla faces and their investors are unaware of, is that just because you have a Model 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.

whiplash451 · 4 hours ago
> 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.

krisoft · 3 hours ago
> To reach mass adoption, self-driving car need to kill one every, say, billion miles.

Important correction “kill one or less, per billion miles”. Before someone reluctantly engineers an intentional sacrifice to meet their quota.

JumpCrisscross · 4 hours ago
> 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.

onlyrealcuzzo · 3 hours ago
Almost - fatalities are obviously important, but not the only metric.

You can prove Tesla's system is a joke with a magnitude of metrics.

WarmWash · 3 hours ago
A death is a catastrophic case, but even a mild collision with bumps and bruises to the people involved would set back Tesla years.

People have an expectation that self driving cars will be magical in ability. Look at the flac waymo has received despite it's most egregious violations being fender bender equivalents

don_neufeld · 3 hours ago
Yeah, my response is to say some version of “you’re bringing anecdote knives to a statistics gunfight”
lateforwork · 5 hours ago
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.
crazygringo · 4 hours ago
> 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.

screye · 4 hours ago
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.

3rodents · 4 hours ago
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.
tiahura · 4 hours ago
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.
tomlis · 4 hours ago
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.

Rebuff5007 · 3 hours ago
I worked in some fully autonomous car projects back in ~2010. I would say every single company and the industry at large felt HUGE pressure to not have any incidents, as a single bad incident from one company can wreck the entire initiative.
m463 · 4 hours ago
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.

SilverElfin · 5 hours ago
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.
VTimofeenko · 4 hours ago
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.

toomuchtodo · 5 hours ago
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.
outside1234 · 4 hours ago
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.
estearum · 3 hours ago
Perhaps he's bad at his job
parineum · 4 hours ago
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.

themafia · 4 hours ago
> 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.

MBCook · 4 hours ago
> 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.

Traster · 5 hours ago
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.

parl_match · 5 hours ago
> 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.

zardo · 5 hours ago
> 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.

hamdingers · 3 hours ago
> so, no, i don't think you will see robotaxis on the roads in blue states

Truly baffled by this genre of comment. "I don't think you will see <thing that is already verifiably happening> any time soon" is a pattern I'm seeing way more lately.

Is this just denying reality to shape perception or is there something else going on? Are the current driverless operations after your knowledge cutoff?

BoredPositron · 5 hours ago
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...
TZubiri · 5 hours ago
>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...

moralestapia · 5 hours ago
>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

SilverElfin · 5 hours ago
> 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.

dsf2d · 5 hours ago
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.

SpicyLemonZest · 5 hours ago
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.
jackp96 · 5 hours ago
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.

giyanani · 5 hours ago
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.

fabian2k · 5 hours ago
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.

rmi0 · 5 hours ago
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.
malfist · 5 hours ago
If you routinely hit other objects, even at 1-4 mph, you are not a good driver.
bryanlarsen · 5 hours ago
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.

NathanKP · 4 hours ago
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.

romaaeterna · 2 hours ago
I'd be interested in more details about the 17mph collision as well. Was it a dead-center collision with a pole after hard braking? Was it a mirror clip or a curb clip or something similar? There seem to be a wide range of possibilities.
FireBeyond · 5 hours ago
Doesn't matter if you're doing 4mph moving into an intersection where cross traffic is doing 35 or more.
vessenes · 5 hours ago
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.

luddit3 · 4 hours ago
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.

malfist · 4 hours ago
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.
nebula8804 · 2 hours ago
Do you have documentation of these moves by shorts? I was there day one at /r/realtesla and I know the events that led to the formation of that sub. A lot of what you describe wasn't part of the lore so im curious to fill in the blanks looking back.

Also as a disclaimer I need to know if you were long the stock at the time. Too much distortion caused by both shorts and longs. I wasn't on either side but I learned after many hard years that so much on /r/teslamotors and /r/realtels was just pure nonsense.

vessenes · 2 hours ago
Sadly I was not long the stock then. I remember clearly a very bad investment decision day - I got a model 3, loved it, sold my Volvo XC60 Inscription, heretofore my favorite daily driver - and did not buy TSLA stock with the proceeds. Expensive mistake. I don't have documentation, I was just an interested bystander.
margalabargala · 5 hours ago
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.
maxdo · 3 hours ago
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.
ra7 · 3 hours ago
There’s also one where Tesla hit a parked truck:

“13781-13644 Street, Heavy truck, No injuries, Proceeding Straight (Heavy truck: parked), 4mph, contact area: left”

kcb · 2 hours ago
it's just HN getting baited for the 100th time by an electrek article.
AlexandrB · 5 hours ago
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...

LightBug1 · 4 hours ago
Yeah, you can get a used Tesla for a bag of chips where I am ... and I still wouldn't buy one.
maxdo · 4 hours ago
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.

flutas · 3 hours ago
For everyone's context, in the same time Waymo had 101 collisions according to the same dataset.
free652 · 2 hours ago
What dataset? Isn't the article clearly specified a different number?

Your context sucks, and it's good as a lie.

>Waymo reports 51 incidents in Austin alone in this same NHTSA database, but its fleet has driven orders of magnitude more miles in the city than Tesla’s supervised “