They've been seen doing this at crime scenes and in the middle of police traffic stops. That speaks volumes too.
The only real test will be who creates the best product, and while waymo seems to have the lead it's arguably too soon to tell.
Actually, we know that vision alone doesn't work.
Sun glare. Fog. Whiteouts. Intense downpours. All of them cause humans to get into accidents, and electronic cameras aren't even as good as human eyes due to dynamic range limitations.
Dead reckoning with GPS and maps are a huge advantage that autonomous cars have over humans. No matter what the conditions are, autonomous cars know where the car is and where the road is. No sliding off the road because you missed a turn.
Being able to control and sense the electric motors at each wheel is a big advantage over "driving feel" from the steering wheel and your inbuilt sense of acceleration.
Radar/lidar is just all upside above and beyond what humans can do.
But also, if you didn’t get the right result, I don’t care how quickly you didn’t get it.
I will also add in my personal experience, while some filters work best together (like imu/gnss), we usually either used lidar or camera, not both. Part of the reason was combining them started requiring a lot more overhead and cross-sensor experts, and it took away from the actual problems we were trying to solve. While I suppose one could argue this is a cost issue (just hire more engineers!) I do think there's value in simplifying your tech stack whenever possible. The fewer independent parts you have the faster you can move and the more people can become an expert on one thing
Again Waymo's lead suggests this logic might be wrong but I think there is a solid engineering defense for moving towards just computer vision. Cameras are by far the best sensor, and there are tangible benefits other than just cost.
> solid engineering defense for moving towards just computer vision
COUNTERPOINT: WAYMO
https://www.npr.org/2025/12/06/nx-s1-5635614/waymo-school-bu...
Price is a factor. I’ve been using the free self driving promo month on my model Y (hardware version 4), and it’s pretty nice 99% of the time.
I wouldn’t pay for it, but I can see a person with more limited faculties, perhaps due to age, finding it worthwhile. And it is available now in a $40k vehicle.
It’s not full self driving, and Waymo is obviously technologically better, but I don’t think anyone is beating Tesla’s utility to price ratio right now.
The radar they had really couldn't detect stationary objects. It relied on the doppler effect to look for moving objects. That would work most of the time, but sometimes there would be a stationary object in the road, and then the computer vision system would have to make a decision, and unfortunately in unusual situations like a firetruck parked at an angle to block off a crash site, the Tesla would plow into the firetruck.
Given that the radar couldn't really ever be reliable enough to create a self driving vehicle, after he hired Karpathy, Elon became convinced that the only way to meet the promise was to just ignore the radar and get the computer vision up to enough reliability to do FSD. By Tesla's own admission now, the hardware on those 2016+ vehicles is not adequate to do the job.
All of that is to say that IMO Elon's primary reason for his opinions about Lidar are simply because those older cars didn't have one, and he had promised to deliver FSD on that hardware, and therefore it couldn't be necessary, or he'd go broke paying out lawsuits. We will see what happens with the lawsuits.
Every time when he has the choice to do something conservative or bold, he goes for the latter, and so long as he has a bit of luck, that is very much a winning strategy. To most people, I guess the stress of always betting everything on red would be unbearable. I mean, the guy got a $300m cash payout in 1999! Hands up who would keep working 100 hour weeks for 26 years after that.
I'm not saying it is either bad or good. He clearly did well out of it for himself financially. But I guess the whole cameras/lidar thing is similar. Because it's big, bold, from the outset unlikely to work, and it's a massive "fake it till you make it" thing.
But if he can crack it, again I guess he hits the jackpot. Never mind cars, they are expensive enough that Lidar cost is a rounding error. But if he can then stick 3d vision into any old cheap cameras, surely that is worth a lot. In fact wasn't this part of Tesla's great vision - to diversify away from cars and into robots etc. I'm sure the military would order thousands and millions of cheapo cameras that work 90% as well as a fancy Lidar - while being fully solid state etc.
That he is using his clients as lab rats for it is yet another reason why I'm not buying one. But to me this is totally in character for Musk.
Something like this: https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh...
(The one thing I would like to see done differently here is including an error interval.)
Of the Tesla accidents, five of them involved either collisions with fixed objects, animals, or a non-injured cyclist. Extremely minor versions of these with human drivers often go unreported.
Unfortunately, without the details, this comparison will end up being a comparison between two rates with very different measurement approaches.
Austin has relatively low miles so the confidence intervals are wider but not too far from what they show for other cities
Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.
Waymo has a huge head start, and it is evident that the "fully autonomous" robotaxi date is far behind what Elon is saying publicly. They will do it, but it is not as close as the hype suggests.
Yet somehow they claim that old versions, using old hardware, on arbitrary roads, using untrained customers as safety drivers somehow average 2.9 million miles per collision in non-highway environments [2], a ~72.5x difference in collision frequency, and 5.1 million miles per collision in all environments, a ~175x(!) difference in collision frequency, when their reporting and data are not scrutinized.
I guess their most advanced software and hardware and professional safety drivers just make it 175x more dangerous.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2025/05/20/musk-says-teslas-self-driv...
[2] https://www.tesla.com/fsd/safety
[3] https://www.forbes.com/sites/alanohnsman/2025/08/20/elon-mus...
[3.a] Tesla own attorneys have argued that statements by Tesla executives are such nonsense that no reasonable person would believe them.
A responsible journalist with half a clue would mention that, and tell us how that distorts the numbers. If we correct for this distortion, it’s clear that the truth would come out in Tesla’s favor here.
Instead the writer embraces the distortion, trying to make Tesla look bad, and one is left to wonder if they are intentionally pushing a biased narrative.
Using your own personal experience, it should be obvious that trivial fender benders are more common than once per lifetime but significantly less common than one every couple of years.
In the past it took a lot less to get the situation fixed… and these were horrendous situations! [1][2] And yet tesla is a factor of 10 worse!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Pinto
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firestone_and_Ford_tire_contro...
Does anyone know what the cite for this might be? I'm coming up empty. To my knowledge, no one (except maybe insurance companies) tallies numbers for fender bender style accidents. This seems like a weirdly high number to me, it's very rare to find any vehicle that reaches 100k miles without at least one bump or two requiring repair.
My suspicion is that this is a count of accidents involving emergency vehicle or law enforcement involvement? In which case it's a pretty terrible apples/oranges comparison.
1/500k miles that includes the interstate will be very different from the rate for an urban environment.
It goes seem like a high number to me - in 30 years of pretty heavy driving I've probably done about 500k miles and I've definitely had more than one incident. But not THAT many more than one, and I've put 100k miles on a few vehicles with zero incidents. Most of my incidents were when I was a newer driver who drove fairly recklessly.
[1] https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...
This one is misleading both in that 8 "crashes" is statistically insignificant to draw conclusions as to its safety compared to humans, but also because these 'crashes' are not actually crashes and instead a variety of things, including hitting a wild animal of unknown size or potentially minor contact with other objects of unspecified impact strength.
They make other unsubstantiated and likely just wrong claims:
> The most critical detail that gets lost in the noise is that these crashes are happening with a human safety supervisor in the driver’s seat (for highway trips) or passenger seat, with a finger on a kill switch.
The robotaxi supervisors are overwhelmingly only the passenger seat - I've never actually seen any video footage of them in the driver seat, and Electrek assuredly has zero evidence of how many of the reported incidents involved someone in the driver seat. Additionally, these supervisors in the passenger seat are not instructed to prevent every single incident (they arent going to emergency brake for a squirrel) and to characterize them as "babysitting to prevent accidents" is just wrong.
This article is full of other glaring problems and lies and mistruths but it's genuinely not worth the effort to write 5 pages on it.
If you want some insight on why Fed Lambert might be doing this, look no further than the bottom of the page: Fred sells and shares "investment tips" which, you guessed it, are perpetually trying to convince people to sell and short Telsa: https://x.com/FredLambert/status/1831731982868369419
Feel free to look at his other posts: it's 95% trying to convince people that Telsa is going bankrupt tomorrow, and trying to slam Elon as much as possible - sometimes for good reasons (transphobia) but sometimes in ways that really harms his credibility, if he actually had any
Lambert has also been accused of astrotrufing in lawsuits, and had to go through a settlement that required him to retract all the libel he had spread: https://www.thedrive.com/tech/21838/the-truth-behind-electre...
The owner of Eletrek, Seth Weintraub, also notably does the same thing: https://x.com/llsethj/status/1217198837212884993
We need far higher quality data than this to reach meaningful conclusions. Implying conclusions based upon this extrapolation is irresponsible.
thomassmith65•2h ago