Still damning that the data is so bad even then. Good data wouldn't tell us anything, the bad data likely means the AI is bad unless they were spectacularly unlucky. But since Tesla redacts all information, I'm not inclined to give them any benefit of the doubt here.
Sorry that does not compute.
It tells you exactly if the AI is any good, as, despite the fact that there were safety drivers on board, 9 crashes happened. Which implies that more crashes would have happened without safety drivers. Over 500,000 miles, that's pretty bad.
Unless you are willing to argue, in bad faith, that the crashes happened because of safety driver intervention..
But if the number of crashes had been lower than for human drivers, this would tell us nothing at all.
I think we're on to something. You imply that good here means the AI can do it's thing without human interference. But that's not how we view, say, LLMs being good at coding.
In the first context we hope for AI to improve safety whereas in the second we merely hope to improve productivity.
In both cases, a human is in the loop which results in second order complexity: the human adjusts behaviour to AI reality, which redefines what "good AI" means in an endless loop.
There's also a denominator problem. The mileage figure appears to be cumulative miles "as of November," while the crashes are drawn from a specific July-November window in Austin. It's not clear that those miles line up with the same geography and time period.
The sample size is tiny (nine crashes), uncertainty is huge, and the analysis doesn't distinguish between at-fault and not-at-fault incidents, or between preventable and non-preventable ones.
Also, the comparison to Waymo is stated without harmonizing crash definitions and reporting practices.
I think its weird to characterize it as legitimate and the say "Go Tesla convince me ohterwise" as if the same audience would ever be reached by Tesla or people would care to do their due diligence.
There have never been truthful statements from his companies, only hype & fluff for monetary gains.
The results have to speak for Tesla very loudly and very clearly. And so far they don’t.
I mean sure you can say that the timelines did slip a lot but that doesn’t really have anything to with the rest that is insinuated here.
I would argue a timeline slipping doesn’t mean you go about killing people and lie about it next. I would even go so far as to say that the timelines did slip to exactly avoid that.
Tesla continues to overpromise, about safety, about timelines that slip due to safety.
We should be a bit more hard nosed and data based when dealing with these things rather than dismissing the core question due to "feelings" and due to Tesla not releasing the sort of data tha allows fair analysis b
You're generous with your words to the point they sound like apologism. Musk has been promising fully autonomous driving "within 1-3 years" since 2013. And he's been charging customers money for that promise for just as long. Timelines keep slipping for more than half of the company's existence now, that's not a slipup anymore.
Tesla has never been transparent with the data on which they base their claims of safety and performance of the system. They tout some nice looking numbers but when anyone like the NHTSA requests the real data they refuse to provide it.
When NHTSA shows you numbers, they're lying. If I tell you I have evidence Tesla is lying you'll tell me to show it or STFU. When Tesla does the same after so many people died, you go all soft and claim everyone else is lying. That's very one sided behavior, more about feelings than facts.
> But this is more your feelings than actually factual.
The article is about "NHTSA crash data, combined with Tesla’s new disclosure of robotaxi mileage". Sounds factual enough. If Tesla is sitting on a trove of data that proves otherwise but refuse to publish it that's on them. If anyone is about the feels and not the facts here, it's you.
Even the already included escape route.
> If I tell you I have evidence Tesla is lying you'll tell me to show it or STFU.
I mean I wouldn’t choose those words but yes. Yes, you have to prove it, because you state it as a fact.
Innocent until proven guilty. There is a reason to this phrase.
The data on this matter of lies, fraud, and bad faith is robust.
Seems to be the other way, though I find that kind of rude to assert as opposed to asking me what informs my opinion. Other comments have answered that very well
No. Not at all. This isn't "timelines slip". This is Musk saying, and I quote, "Self driving is a solved problem. We are just tuning the details." in 2016, and in 2021, "Right now our highest priority is working on solving the problem."
Somewhere along the line, it apparently got "unsolved".
"Timelines slipped" is far too generous for someone who, whenever Tesla is facing bad press, will imply that a new FSD release coming in 6 months, 3 months, a month, will solve all the issues plaguing it so far. Repeatedly. Those aren't real timelines.
Hell, even Tesla has had to add comments to investor and securities documents saying that "Musk's statements are aspirational and do not always reflect engineering realities."
I think taking time to make sure the system works is the right call. Delaying it is the right call. Not publishing something because you had a different impression previously, just because, is the right call.
I think it integrity to delay a product even when your investors might get angry. Is it a winning strategy at wallstreet? No, probably not.
But what is the argument here „Musk bad“ because he delays a product because it’s not ready?
I think doing the due diligence is required here. Musk argument „it’s solved“ could even be argued by „look at Waymo“ they are doing it, aren’t they?
Tesla is aiming for more than that though. And as it is in product development sometimes, sometimes your don’t know what you don‘t know. Because why do you want to focus on chains guarding parkingspots, your cameras aren’t able to see, when your car can’t even drive through the city.
This is such a big thing to solve and 100% is impossible given some definitions.
Back to the article, I think delaying for safety is the right call, and that is also what the article says. It’s just that the article is in bad faith, as most of the arguments here are.
You probably would turn around and slam Musk for a System that obviously problematic as the alternative and until then it’s saying that he delays.
And if it were obviously problematic I think it would be much louder than just an article from a website that is know for having a biased view at things.
You’re absolutely right but musk’s companies constantly fail to do that.
You should look up the past year or so of what’s happened at Tesla’s gigafactory in Germany. It’s pretty wild.
Also different company, same issue/owner: https://www.newschannel5.com/news/workers-walk-off-nashville...
Do you think Twitter/musk took time to get Grok right before unleashing it on social media?
That just sounds like a cope. The OP's claim is that the article rests on shaky evidence, and you haven't really refuted that. Instead, you just retreated from the bailey of "Tesla's Robotaxi data confirms crash rate 3x worse ..." to the motte of "the burden of proof here on Tesla".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-bailey_fallacy
More broadly I think the internet is going to be a better place if comments/articles with bad reasoning are rebuked from both sides, rather than getting a pass from one side because it's directionally correct, eg. "the evidence WMDs in Iraq is flimsy but that doesn't matter because Hussein was still a bad dictator".
But so far, if all the data we have points in this direction, even if the certainty is low, it's fair to point this out.
They're saying that Tesla should be held to a very high standard of transparency if they are to be trusted. I can't speak to OP, but I'd argue this should apply to any company with aspirations toward autonomous driving vehicles.
The title might be misleading if you don't read the article, but the article itself at some level is about how Tesla is not being as transparent as other companies. The "shaky evidence" is due to Tesla's own lack of transparency, which is the point of stating that the burden of proof should be on Tesla. The article is about how, even with lack of transparency, the data doesn't look good, raising the question of what else they might not be disclosing.
From the article: "Perhaps more troubling than the crash rate is Tesla’s complete lack of transparency about what happened... If Tesla wants to be taken seriously as a robotaxi operator, it needs to do two things: dramatically improve its safety record, and start being honest about what’s happening..."
I'd argue the central thesis of the article isn't one of statistical estimation; it's a statement about evidentiary burden.
You don't have to agree with the position that Tesla should be held a high transparency standard. But the article is taking the position that you should, and that if you do agree with that position, that you might say that even by Tesla's unacceptable standards they are failing. They're essentially (if implicitly) challenging Tesla to provide more data to refute the conclusions, saying "prove us wrong", knowing that if they do, then at least Tesla would be improving transparency.
a) Teslas are unsafe. The sparse data they're legally obligated to provide shows this clearly.
b) Elon Musk is sitting on a treasure trove of safety data showing that FSD finally works safely + with superhuman crash avoidance, but is deciding not to share it.
You're honestly going with (b)? We're talking about the braggart that purchased Twitter so he could post there with impunity. To put it politely, it would be out of character for him to underpromise + overdeliver.
Lemonade announced an entirely new product for FSD driving, which it says should cut rates for FSD vehicles And importantly, FSD driving is no longer covered by the regular policy, so FSD drivers now need two separate insurance policies if using Lemonade: the regular insurance policy, and another one just for when using FSD.
The actual combined cost of the two insurance policies is more than the previous policy was because they didn't reduce rates for the normal insurance policies.
Also, important to note: Lemonade isn't actually available in the states with the largest population of Tesla owners, like California. So...basically this is a big nothingburger.
There are things that don't get shared out of principle. For example there are anonymous votes or behind the scenes negotiations without commitment or security critical data.
But given that Musk tends to parade around vague promises since a very long time, it seems sharing data that looks very good would certainly be something they would do.
They say it ain't so common
This is a statement of fact but based on this assumption:
> low-speed contact events that would often never show up as police-reported crashes for human drivers
Assumptions work just as well both ways. Musk and Tesla have been consistently opaque when it comes to the real numbers they base their advertising on. Given this past history of total lack of transparency and outright lies it's safe to assume that any data provided by Tesla that can't be independently verified by multiple sources is heavily skewed in Tesla's favor. Whatever safety numbers Tesla puts out you can bet your hat they're worse in reality.
Let's examine the Elektrek editor's feed, to understand how "impartial" he is about Tesla:
Btw, do you happen to know, why electrek.co changed their tune in such a way? I was commenting on a similarly negative story by the same site, and said that they are always anti-Tesla. But then somebody pointed out that this wasn't always the case, that they were actually supportive, but then suddenly turned.
People roasted him for being a Tesla/Elon fanboy: https://www.thedrive.com/tech/21838/the-truth-behind-electre...
Fred gradually started asking tougher questions when Tesla's schedule slipped on projects and Elon ended up feuding with Fred (and I think blocking him) on Twitter: https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/bgmwk8/twitter...
Since then Fred has had a more realistic (IMHO) outlook on Tesla, although some might call it a "beef" since he's no longer an Elon sycophant.
If we assume the best (per HN guidelines): Up to about 2018 Tesla was the market-leading EV company, and the whole thesis of Electrek is that EVs are the future. So, of course they covered Tesla frequently and in a generally positive light.
Since then, the facts have changed. Elon's become increasingly erratic, and has been making increasingly unhinged claims about Tesla's current and future products. At the same time, Tesla's offerings are far behind domestic standards, which are even further behind international competition. Also, many people have died due to obvious Tesla design flaws (like the door handles, and false advertising around FSD).
Journalistic integrity explains the difference in coverage over the years. Coverage from any fact-based outlet would have a similar shift in sentiment.
TFA also does a comparison with other self-driving car companies, which you acknowledge, but dismiss: however, we can't harmonize crash definitions and reporting practices as you would like, because Tesla is obfuscating their data.
TFA's main point is that we can't really know what this data means because Tesla keep their data secret, but others like Waymo disclose everything they can, and are more transparent about what happened and why.
TFA is actually saying Tesla should open up their data to allow for better analysis and comparison, because at the moment their current reporting practice make them look crazy bad.
If that's so, then the article title is very poor.
Where does it say that? I see "However, that figure doesn’t include non-police-reported incidents. When adding those, or rather an estimate of those, humans are closer to 200,000 miles between crashes, which is still a lot better than Tesla’s robotaxi in Austin."
All but one of the Tesla crashes obviously involved significant property damage or injuries (the remaining one is ambiguous).
So, based on the text of the article, they're assuming only 2/5ths of property damage / injury accidents are reported to the police. That's lower than I would have guessed (don't people use their car insurance, which requires the police report?), but presumably backed by data.
Car insurance often requires the payment of an excess, and a loss of no claims bonuses. I've had two prangs, only one was reported to my insurance as the damage caused by the lorry that smashed into me was significant. That was not reported to the police, and an insurance claim does not require a police report.
How corrupt and unaccountable to the public is the city of Austin Texas, even, for allowing them to turn in incident reports like this?
The 3x figure in the title is based on a comparison of the Tesla reports with estimated average human driver miles without an incident, not based on police report data. The comparison with police-report data would lead to a 9x figure instead, which the article presents but quickly dismisses.
The denominator problem is made up. Tesla Robotaxi has only been launched in one location, Austin, and only since July (well, 28th June, so maybe there is a few days discrepancy?). So the crash data and the miles data can only refer to this same period. Furthermore, if the miles driven are actually based on some additional length of time, then the picture gets even worse for Tesla, as the denominator for those 9 incidents gets smaller.
The analysis indeed doesn't distinguish between the types of accidents, but this is irrelevant. The human driver estimates for miles driven without incident also don't distinguish between the types of incidents, so the comparison is still very fair (unless you believe people intentionally tried to get the Tesla cars to crash, which makes little sense).
The comparison to Waymo is also done based on incidents reported by both companies under the same reporting requirements, to the same federal agency. The crash definitions and reporting practices are already harmonized, at least to a good extent, through this.
Overall there is no way to look at this data and draw a conclusion that is significantly different from the article: Tesla is bad at autonomous driving, and has a long way to go until it can be considered safe on public roads. We should also remember that robotaxis are not even autonomous, in fact! Each car has a human safety monitor that is ready to step in and take control of the vehicle at any time to avoid incidents - so the real incident rate, if the safety monitor weren't there, would certainly be even worse than this.
I'd also mention that 5 months of data is not that small a sample size, despite you trying to make it sound so (only 9 crashes).
I think OP's point still stands here. Who are people reporting minor incidents to that would be publicly available that isn't the police? This data had to come from somewhere and police reports is the only thing that makes sense to me.
If I bump my car into a post, I'm not telling any government office about it.
I can't be certain about auto insurers, but healthcare insurers just straight up sell the insurance claims data. I would be surprised if auto insurers haven't found that same "innovation."
So I think it's reasonable to wonder about the accuracy of estimates for humans. We (ie society) could really use a rigorous dataset for this.
Tesla doesn't because presumably the data is bad.
>> However, that figure doesn’t include non-police-reported incidents. When adding those, or rather an estimate of those, humans are closer to 200,000 miles between crashes, which is still a lot better than Tesla’s robotaxi in Austin.
So, let's exclude hitting fixed objects as you suggest (though the incident we'd be excluding might have been anything from a totaled car and huge fire to zero damage), and also assume that humans fail to report injury / serious property damage accidents more often than not (as the article assumes).
That gets the crash rate down from an unbiased 9x to a lowball 2.66x higher than human drivers. That's with human monitors supervising the cars.
2.66x is still so poor they should be pulled of the streets IMO.
I don't know what data is available but what I really care about more than anything is incidents where a human could be killed or harmed, followed by animals, then other property and finally, the car itself. So I'm not arguing to exclude hitting fixed objects, I'm arguing that severity of incident is much more important than total incidents.
Even when comparing it to human drivers, if Tesla autopilot gets into 200 fender benders and 0 fatal crashes I'd prefer that over a human driver getting into 190 fender benders and 10 fatal crashes. Directionally though, I suspect the numbers would probably go the other direction, more major incidents from automated cars because, when are successful, they usually handle situations perfectly and when they fail, they just don't see that stopped car in front of you and hit it at full speed.
> That gets the crash rate down from an unbiased 9x to a lowball 2.66x higher than human drivers. That's with human monitors supervising the cars.
> 2.66x is still so poor they should be pulled of the streets IMO.
I'm really not here to argue they are safe or anything like that. It just seems clear to me that every assumption in this article is made in the direction that makes Tesla look worse.
Of course, I fully admit that for all I know it's possible the article entirely made up these numbers, I haven't tried to look for an alternative source or anything.
I don’t think it invalidates the conclusion, but it seems like one fair point in an otherwise off-target defense.
That was based on a sample size of 9 crashes. In the month following that, they've added one more crash while also increasing the miles driven per month.
The headline could just as easily be about the dramatic decline in their crash rate! Or perhaps the data is just too small to analyze like this, and Electrek authors being their usual overly dramatic selves.
Unless one was a Tesla insider, or had a huge interest in Tesla over other people on the road, such spin would not be a normal thing to propose saying.
Media outlets, even ones devoted to EVs, should not adopt the very biased framing you propose.
Previous article: Tesla with human supervisor at wheel: 10x worse than human alone.
Current article: Tesla with remote supervisor: 3-9x worse than human alone.
Given the small sample sizes, this shows a clear trend: Tesla's autopilot stuff (or perhaps vehicle design) is causing a ton of accidents, regardless of whether it's being operated locally by customers or remotely by professionals.
I'd like to see similar studies broken down by vehicle manufacturer.
The ADAS in one of our cars is great, but occasionally beeps when it shouldn't.
The ADAS in our other car cannot be disabled and false positives every 10-20 miles. Every week or so it forces the vehicle out of lane (either left of double yellow line center, or into another car's lane).
If the data on crash rates for those two models were public, I guarantee the latter car would have been recalled by now.
Insurance companies are known for analytics and don't survive if they use bad data. This points to your comment being correct.
Tesla's own stats don't count any accident without airbag deployment, regardless of severity (and modern airbag systems have a number of factors that play into deployment), and, for some unknown reason, they don't count fatalities in their crash statistics.
Also, even for a non-taxi, 200,000 miles between minor hits on average seems incredibly high - that would mean that an average car in US does not hit anything in a car's lifetime. I'm not sure where that number is coming from, if that's non-reportable events.
If someone is driving dangerously despite these safety features, they should not have a license to operate a motor vehicle on public roads.
These features are still valuable even to safe drivers simply because safe drivers are human and will still make mistakes.
FSD is not perfect, but it is everyday amazing and useful.
(They also say there's still the handoff issue if a human needs to take control but it's still a big net win.)
1. https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/tesla-...
I’m a decent driver, I never use my phone while driving and actively avoid distractions (sometimes I have to tell everyone in the car to stop talking), and yet features like lane assist and automatic braking have helped me avoid possible collisions simply because I’m human and I’m not perfect. Sometimes a random thought takes my attention away for a moment, or I’m distracted by sudden movement in my peripheral vision, or any number of things. I can drive very safely, but I can not drive perfectly all the time. No one can.
These features make safe drivers even safer. They even make the dangerous drivers (relatively) safer.
Driving a car takes effort. ADAS features (or even just plain regular "driving systems") can reduce the cognitive load, which makes for safer driving. As much as I enjoy driving with a manual transmission, an automatic is less tiring for long journeys. Not having to occupy my mind with gear changes frees me up to pay more attention to my surroundings. Adaptive cruise control further reduces cognitive load.
The danger comes when assistance starts to replace attention. Tesla's "full self-driving" falls into this category, where the car doesn't need continuous inputs but the driver is still de jure in charge of the vehicle. Humans just aren't capable of concentrating on monitoring for an extended period.
Driver fatigue is real, no matter how much coffee you take.
Lane-keep is a game changer if the UX is well done. I'm way more rested when I arrive at destination with my Model 3 compared to when I use the regular ICE with bad lane-assist UX.
EDIT: the fact that people that look at their phones will still look at their phones with lane-keep active, only makes it a little safer for them and everyone else, really.
As an example, after a refreshing 8h night's sleep, you put yourself at the wheel and you know you need to drive for 8h. After 2h, you'll feel the need to stretch your legs, have a bite, go to the toilet.
But if you have something like Tesla's AP, you'll still be alert and awake. Otherwise - at least for me, but I bet for many people - the constant nagging of micro-correcting the wheel, keeping the distance to the car in front, keeping the right speed, takes a huge toll on your mental resources, so much that it puts you to sleep whether you want it or not, and many people will try and push through that regardless.
You're saying that cruise and lane assist are dangerous because they're used to do bad things.
I'm saying they're very liberating from the busywork that is driving, and even people that use them as an excuse to stay on their phones are better off for it, because something more alert and precise is driving for them and as a consequence, less harm can derive from their stupidity.
I'm not saying that people that do stupid things should not be punished, and I'm quite happy that Tesla had to implement better driver monitoring. I know how things work and that I always need to monitor the system, but many people assume it's a magic button and disconnect their brain.
"Rear collision while backing" could mean they tapped a bollard. Doesn't sound like a crash. A human driver might never even report this. What does "Incident at 18 mph" even mean?
By my own subjective count, only three descriptions sound unambiguously bad, and only one mentions a "minor injury".
I'm not saying it's great, and I can imagine Tesla being selective in publishing, but based on this I wouldn't say it seems dire.
For example, roundabouts in cities (in Europe anyway) tend to increase the number of crashes, but they are overall of lower severity, leading to an overall improvement of safety. Judging by TFA alone I can't tell this isn't the case here. I can imagine a robotaxi having a different distribution of frequency and severity of accidents than a human driver.
> roundabouts in cities (in Europe anyway) tend to increase the number of crashes
Not in France, according to data. It depends on the speed limit, but they decrease accident by 34% overall, and almost 20% when the speed limit is 30 or 50 km/h.
If a human had eyes on every angle of their car and they still did that it would represent a lapse in focus or control -- humans don't have the same advantages here.
With that said : i would be more concerned about what it represents when my sensor covered auto-car makes an error like that, it would make me presume there was an error in detection -- a big problem.
A bollard at three feet might look like a grain silo at 400 yards. I could see angles getting to where the camera sees "beige rectangle (wall), red cylinder (bollard)" and it's basically an abstract modern art piece.
I see things on security cameras a lot that in low resolution are nearly impossible for me to decipher.
This is compounded by the system mistakes likely being hard-errors. A computer hard-error vs. human lapse of judgement is potentially the difference between the vehicle slowly crushing a small child as they scream and beg for help vs. a human stopping as soon as they felt/heard something. Context matters.
The compared error-rates must consider if it could have been avoided or mitigated, the near misses, the human vs. computer type of error, and how hard-errors may lead to horrifying scenarios.
The tech needs to be at least 100x more error free vs humans. It cannot be on par with human error rate.
As engineers, we understand that the technology will go from unsafe, to par-with-humans, to safer-than-humans, but in order for it to get to the latter, it requires much validation and training in an intermediate state, with appropriate safeguards.
Tesla's approach has been more risk averse and conservative than others. It has compiled data and trained its models on billions of miles of real world telemetry from its own fleet (all of which are equipped with advanced internet-connected computers). Then it has rolled out the robotaxi tech slowly and cautiously, with human safety drivers, and only in two areas.
I defend Tesla's tech, because I've owned and driven a Tesla (Model S) for many years, and its ten-year-old Autopilot (autosteer and cruise control with lane shift) is actually smoother and more reliable than many of its competitors current offerings.
I've also watched hours of footage of Tesla's current FSD on YouTube, and seen it evolve into something quite remarkable. I think the end-to-end neural net with human-like sensors is more sensible than other approaches, which use sensors like LIDAR as a crutch for their more rudimentary software.
Unlike many commenters on this platform I have no political issues with Elon, so that doesn't colour my judgement of Tesla as a company, and its technological achievements. I wish others would set aside their partisan tribablism and recognise that Tesla has completely revolutionised the EV market and continues to make significant positive contributions to technology as a whole, all while opening all its patents and opening its Supercharger network to vehicles from competitors. Its ethics are sound.
Do me a favor and take Musk and get on a plane with just a bunch of cameras instead of sevsors like radar, airspeed sensor, altimeter, GPS, ILS, etc.
No need for those crutches. Do autopiloting like a real man!
Tesla cars have speed sensors as well as GPS. (Altimeter and ILS not being relevant). I agree with Musk's claim they don't need LIDAR because human drivers don't; it's self-evidently true. But I think they _should_ have it because they can then be safer than humans; why settle for our current accident and death rate?
Humans hear car/road noises, along with potential screams from outside or passenger shouts from inside, we sense vibrations, can respond to pedestrian or other driver hand signals, and constantly predict hazards through perceptions. How is the car doing all of this, if not for additional sensors and processing?
You can land a plane by eye, but what happens when there's fog? That's exactly like the situation in cars. LIDAR can provide extra sensory data where the cameras absolutely fail, just like our own eyes.
Knowing there's a solution to this, we are just to accept the car will fail where humans will? That's progress? Why wouldn't you want that extra data for such a small relative cost? LIDAR was already used on cars as a safety-only front collision avoidance system (that's how cheap it is to install).
In a properly designed system, adding data which is useful and cannot otherwise be inferred makes complete sense.
Given these cars are supposed to be so good that they will be working autonomously for you and pay themselves off in a year or two, the idea that LIDAR etc. is unnecessary and too expensive and will be lead to actively worse performance, is just insane logic for an "engineering" discussion.
> The "salute" in particular is simply a politically-expedient freeze-frame from a Musk speech, where he said "my heart goes out to you all" and happened to raise his arm. I could provide freeze-frame images of Obama and Hilary Clinton doing similar "salutes" and claim this makes them "far right fascists" but I would never insult the reader's intelligence by doing so.
For Obama and Clinton you can find freeze frames showing their arm in a similar position, but when you look at the full video it was in the middle of something that does not match a Nazi salute. Here are several examples: https://x.com/ExposingNV/status/1881647306724049116?t=CGKtg0...
If you had a camera in my kitchen you could find similar freeze frames of me whenever I make a sausge/egg/cheese on an English muffin breakfast sandwich because the ramekin I use to shape the egg patty is on the top shelf.
With Musk the full video shows it matches from when his arm starts moving to the end of the gesture. See https://x.com/BartoSitek/status/1882081868423860315?t=8F0hL-...
On the other hand, what you're trying to extrapolate here seems somewhat contrived.
I expect self-driving cars to be launched unsupervised on public roads in only an order-of-magnitude safer than human drivers shape. Or not launch at all.
One can pay thousands of people to babysit these cars with their hands on the wheel for many years until that threshold is reached, and if no one is ready to pay for that effort then we'll just drive ourselves until the end of time.
You lost me here. Tesla's approach has absolutely not been risk averse or conservative. They've allowed random public "testers" to beta test their self driving stack while even they called it a "beta". They've irresponsibly called the feature "full self driving" when it wasn't able to do any such thing. They've made completely outlandish promises (like FSD driving you from coast to coast in 2016). Finally they've staged marketing videos of FSD "working"[1]. Just deplorable stuff and using the public as their guinea pigs (and piggie bank).
> Its ethics are sound.
You've got to be joking. Where's the "/s"?
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2023/01/17/tesla-engineer-testifies-t...
Edit: Forgot another Tesla chonker of a promise. Remember when Elon said a Tesla car would be an appreciating asset because it would make you money by acting as a robotaxi when you're not using it? That was in 2019[2]. Has your Model S appreciated? Are you able to sell it for more today than the purchase price?
[2] https://electrek.co/2025/03/18/elon-musk-biggest-lie-tesla-v...
The problem is, they lost their drive. The competition has caught up - Mercedes Benz has an actually certified Level 4 Autonomous Driving system, on the high-class end pretty much every major manufacturer has something competitive with Tesla, the low budget end has something like the Dacia Spring starting at 12.000€, and the actual long-haul truck (i.e. not the fake "truck" aka Cybertruck) segment has (at least) Volvo, MAN and DAF making full-size trucks.
Where is the actual unique selling point that Tesla has now?
I don't like Elon and his politics, but I'm very grateful for Tesla to have shaken up the car industry. Everyone is better for it.
I agree Tesla kind of increased the desirability of EVs at least in the US, but I'm not convinced it wouldn't have happened anyway.
It's a hard question to answer, because you're talking about a counterfactual.
I feel like there's probably some broader type of cognitive bias at play (where we assume something common wouldn't have been common otherwise, because it is common) but I don't know what the term for it might be.
Consider how many car manufacturers are backtracking, the fact that China will now win the EV race, utility energy prices have skyrocketed, and the damage done not only to the brand but people's view towards EVs in general.
Forcing this play happened too soon.
There isn't enough money and most importantly margin in the car industry to warrant such a valuation, so he has to pivot away from cars into the next thing.
Just to make an example of how risky it is to be a car company for Tesla.
In 2025 Toyota has had: 3.5 times Tesla's revenue, 8 times the net income and twice the margin.
And Toyota has a market cap that is 6 times lower than Tesla.
It would take tesla a gargantuan effort to match Toyota's numbers and margins, and if it matched it...it would be a disaster for Tesla's stock.
Hell, Tesla makes much less money than Mercedes Benz and with a smaller margin..
Mercedes has 60% more revenue and twice the net income. Yet, Tesla is valued around 40 times Mercedes-Benz.
Tesla *must* pivot away from cars and make it a side business or sooner or later that stuff is crashing, and it will crash fast and hard.
Musk understands that, which is why he focusing on robo taxis and robots. It's the only way to sell Tesla to naive investors.
I see nothing wrong here, correction back to reality.
I understand why people adored him blindly in the early days, but liking him now after its clear what sort of person he is and always will be is same as liking trump. Many people still do it, but its hardly a defensible position unless on is already invested in his empire.
I found the article I was talking about: https://alisoncrosthwait.substack.com/p/a-ketamine-addicts-p...
It says it's quite easy for ketamine use to get out of control without the users noticing, that they're are able to work effectively despite that, and that they tend to develop radically different and delusional beliefs. Given that Elon has admitted to self-administering ketamine, I don't think the idea should be dismissed.
Look how much longer, and more experience Waymo has and they still have multiple issues a week popping up online, and thats with running them in a very small well mapped and planned out area. Musk wants robo taxies globally, that's just not happening, not any time soon and certainly not by the 10 year limit for him to get his trillion dollar bonus from Tesla, which is the only reason he's pushing so hard to make it happen.
But when you look at it:
- X.ai is basically getting into the race by throwing money at the problem and using your name to get funding in a hyped industry.
- Do a buyout of your own company with it, get access to data that you restricted to everyone else.
- Merge it with SpaceX for "datacenters in space", do an IPO for a huge valuation
- Probably merge it with Tesla, overhype everything
- As the humanoid, AI and space industry grows, so will the valuation just because of the market growth, not necessarily because of great/revolutionary products
At that point, nobody can even consider what the valuation is, as it is a mishmash of promises, fudged numbers, real numbers, potential numbers, contracts, hype and everything else. It allows moving financials around and tuning things to get him his 1T package and hype things even more.
I mean congrats to Elon, just by overhyping his products he shifts the timeline narrative more towards techno-optimism and earns himself more money. The financial shenanigans to follow in the next few years will be an interesting period for future financial archeologists.
Well, everyone is doing that. That's what AI research is.
Comparing stats from this many miles to just over 1 trillion miles driven collectively in the US in a similar time period is a bad idea. Any noise in Tesla's data will change the ratio a lot. You can already see it from the monthly numbers varying between 1 and 4.
This is a bad comparison with not enough data. Like my household average for the number of teeth per person is ~25% higher than world average! (Includes one baby)
Edit: feel free to actually respond to the claim rather than downvote
At which point will the comparison be considered relevant?
I'm not saying the relevant agencies shouldn't be checking every crash. Just that "Tesla’s own Robotaxi data confirms crash rate 3x worse than humans even with monitor" is completely unjustified. But "crash at rate maybe the same as human and maybe 18x - we're 99% sure" doesn't get clicks.
It would be ironic that people are claiming the Tesla numbers for Autopilot are to optimistic, as it is used on highways only and at the same time don't notice that city-only numbers for the FSD would be pessimistic statistics-wise.
No human driver would report this kind of incident. A human driver would probably forget it after the next traffic light.
While it's clearly Tesla's fault (if you hit any static object it's your fault), when you take this kind of 'incident' into account of course it'd look worse than humans.
That Elon is riding this wave amidst the transparency of the whole thing is the funniest part. It's like watching people lose money at the "three cup" game but the cups are clear.
My theory has always been Trumps grand con was acting like what poor people thought a rich person was like, Elon acts like what morons think a genius is like.
Instead they let Elon made their brand so toxic people are actively avoiding it.
Of course, Twitter was a quasi-monopoly as well. That said, Bluesky emerged but only as an alternative with much less critical mass.
It doesn't help that Tesla, making extremely low quality and uncomfortable cars for the price point, provides plenty of dislikable things to find.
Most people don't know about the political aspect.
- A lot of people fervently hoped they wouldn't need to drive for much longer and their kids wouldn't even need to learn
- So much progress had been made with deep learning is a fairly short length of time that surely we were on the cusp of broadly deployed autonomous vehicles.
It's also extremely implausible that Tesla has data that their cars are very safe, but choose to instead publish vague data that makes them seem much worse. It's for example much more likely that these 9 incidents reported are just the bad incidents that they think they won't be able to hide, rather than assuming these are all or mostly minor incidents like lightly bumping into a static object.
It's a pretty logical conclusion to say that numbers they won't share must make them look bad in some way.
Elon Musk is a divisive figure.
That would mean their secret data, if published, supports writing horror stories about it.
OTOH if the data turned out to show spectacularly safe operations, that would shut off any possible negative articles.
Of all people, how likely is it that Musk is intentionally avoiding good publicity by keeping a lot of data secret?
I mean, just look at the trail of headless corpses (there actually are multiple) left by Tesla during this beta test. Weren't we all here to witness a previous version of the thing running straight through a cartoon wall? Of course this thing was always going to end in disappointment -- it's sucked its whole existence. It's never been serious it's always been an 80/20 play hoping to get away with the con without delivering the rest of the 20% that makes it work.
Tesla's technology is bunk, their entire FSD thesis of "vision only" has been a dismal failure, and it's actually going to tank the entire Tesla car brand. I've been saying this for a while and it looks like it's finally starting to happen: Tesla is going to exit the car business never having delivered FSD in any viable capacity (although they'll claim total success), and Musk will retarget his empire to running the same FSD grift but with robots. Musk learned the bigger the promise, the more runway people give you to make it a reality. Spin a big enough yarn and Musk can live the rest of his life delivering nothing -- not Mars, not FSD, not AI, nada -- and people will still call him a genius.
But electrek's reporting is biased and in bad faith when it comes to Tesla/Musk.
https://www.iseecars.com/most-dangerous-cars-study#:~:text=T...
(negative) Tesla to stop selling Full Self-Driving package, moves to subscription-only
(negative) Elon Musk says Tesla 'almost done' with AI5 design, 6 months after saying it was 'finished'
(negative) Tesla's full 2025 data from Europe is in, and it is a total bloodbath
(neutral) Tesla updates 2026 Model Y with new features, launches tiny third row in the US
(positive) Tesla launches US-made solar panel, a rare sign of life for its solar business
(negative) Elon Musk moves goalpost again: admits Tesla needs 10 billion miles for 'safe unsupervised' FSD
(negative) Are Tesla Gigafactory Berlin's days numbered?
(negative) Elon Musk shows total ignorance of Tesla's current falling sales trajectory
(negative) Tesla rolls out 0% financing to boost declining sales
(negative) Tesla (TSLA) releases Q4 delivery results: confirms decline in sales is accelerating
(negative) Tesla Cybercabs spotted testing, unsurprisingly with steering wheels
(negative) Elon Musk's top 5 Tesla predictions for 2025 that didn't happen
(negative) Tesla (TSLA) does something unusual ahead of Q4 delivery results
(negative) Elon Musk drops 'sustainable' from Tesla's mission
(negative) Tesla's Robotaxi project in Austin is much smaller than Musk claims
(neutral) Tesla Robotaxi spotted without a safety driver in Austin; Musk confirms testing begins
(negative) Tesla US sales drop to under 40,000 units following tax credit expiration
(neutral) Tesla CEO Elon Musk claims driverless Robotaxis coming to Austin in 3 weeks
(positive) Tesla announces 2025 holiday update with a few cool features
(negative) Tesla (TSLA) sales keep crashing in Europe with a single market temporarily saving ithttps://www.iseecars.com/most-dangerous-cars-study#:~:text=T...
That needs extraordinary evidence. Instead the evidence is misleading guesses.
A safety system with blurry performance boundaries is called "a massive risk." That's why responsible system designers first define their ODD, then design their system to perform to a pre-specified standard within that ODD.
Tesla's technology is "works mostly pretty well in many but not all scenarios and we can't tell you which is which"
It is not an extraordinary claim at all that such a system could yield worse outcomes than a human with no asssistance.
Waymo studied this back when it was a Google moonshot, and concluded that going full automation is safer than human supervision. A driving system that mostly works lulls the driver into complacency.
Besides automation failure, driver complacency was a big component[1] of the fatal accident that led to the shuttering of Ubers self-driving efforts - the safety driver was looking at her phone for minutes in the lead up. It is also the reason why driver attention is monitored in L2
The idea that mostly-automating the system because it's statistically better than humans, but requiring human-assistance to monitor and respond in these exact situations, was flawed logic to begin with. Comparisons of statistics should be made like-for-like, given these are scenarios we can easily control.
For example, a robotic taxis should at least be compared to professional drivers on similar routes, roads, vehicles, and times of day. Not just comparing "all drivers in all vehicles in all scenarios over time" with private company data that cherry-picks "automated driving" miles on highways etc. (where existing assistance systems could already achieve near-perfect results).
Companies testing autonomy on the public should be forced to upload all crash data to investigators as part of their licensing. The vehicles already have extremely detailed sensor and video data to operate. The fact that we have no verified data to compare to existing human statistics is damning. It's a farce.
None of those millions of miles resulted in a smoking gun showing the cars to be even 2x worse.
And yet a badly written blog thinks they've shown them to be 3x worse with professional monitors? This is indeed an extraordinary claim.
TIL I'm incredibly unlucky.
An insurance policy study estimates that the average person is involved in 3–4 collisions in their lifetime.
SilverBirch•1w ago
> the fleet has traveled approximately 500,000 miles
Let's say they average 10mph, and say they operate 10 hours a day, that's 5,000 car-days of travel, or to put it another way about 30 cars over 6 months.
That's tiny! That's a robotaxi company that is literally smaller than a lot of taxi companies.
One crash in this context is going to just completely blow out their statistics. So it's kind of dumb to even talk about the statistics today. The real take away is that the Robotaxis don't really exist, they're in an experimental phase and we're not going to get real statistics until they're doing 1,000x that mileage, and that won't happen until they've built something that actually works and that may never happen.
razingeden•1w ago
One crash in 500,000 miles would merely put them on par with a human driver.
One crash every 50,000 miles would be more like having my sister behind the wheel.
I’ll be sure to tell the next insurer that she’s not a bad driver - she’s just one person operating an itty bitty fleet consisting of one vehicle!
If the cybertaxi were a human driver accruing double points 7 months into its probationary license it would have never made it to 9 accidents because it would have been revoked and suspended after the first two or three accidents in her state and then thrown in JAIL as a “scofflaw” if it continued driving.
jacquesm•1w ago
> One crash every 50,000 miles would be more like having my sister behind the wheel.
I'm not sure if that leads to the conclusion that you want it to.
razingeden•1w ago
simiones•1w ago
razingeden•4d ago
Thank you, yes, I could have said that better. But yeah as a new human driver if I’m too sloppy and get into too many incidents , the penalty is harsh and I’d say that “none of the autonomous companies are held to the same standard” but that’s not 100% true: we do have cities and states refusing to play ball or issue permits here.
But that’s exactly right. my opinion was/is that there should be a probationary period for the first year of new autonomous technology — or major deviations from existing and proven technologies — too. And if it causes too many accidents or violations, then, it should be held to the same standard I am
mcherm•1w ago
More accurately, the real takeaway is that Tesla's robo-taxis don't really exist.
UltraSane•1w ago
micromacrofoot•1w ago
awakeasleep•1w ago
estearum•1w ago
UltraSane•1w ago
vel0city•1w ago
UltraSane•1w ago
marricks•1w ago
At least 3 of them sound dangerous already, and it's on Tesla to convince us they're safe. It could be a statistical anomaly so far, but hovering at 9x the alternative doesn't provide confidence.
SilverBirch•1w ago
amelius•1w ago
So if the crash statistics are insufficient, then we cannot trust the deep learning.
SilverBirch•1w ago
mbreese•1w ago
At first, I think you’re right - these are (thankfully) rare events. And because of this, the accident rate is Poisson distributed. At this low of a rate, it’s really hard to know what the true average is, so we do really need more time/miles to know how good/bad the Teslas are performing. I also suspect they are getting safer over time, but again… more data required. But, we do have the statistical models to work with these rare events.
But then I think about your comment about it only being 30 cars operating over 6 months. Which, makes sense, except for the fact that it’s not like having a fleet of individual drivers. These robotaxis should all be running the same software, so it’s statistically more like one person driving 500,000 miles. This is a lot of miles! I’ve been driving for over 30 years and I don’t think I’ve driven that many miles. This should be enough data for a comparison.
If we are comparing the Tesla accident rate to people in a consistent manner (accident classification), it’s a valid comparison. So, I think the way this works out is: given an accident rate of 1/500000, we could expect a human to have 9 accidents over the same miles with a probability of ~ 1 x 10^-6. (Never do live math on the internet, but I think this is about right).
Hopefully they will get better.
vel0city•1w ago
mbreese•1w ago
vel0city•1w ago
Its also kind of telling that despite supposedly having this tech ready to go for years they've only bothered rolling out a few cars which are still supervised. If this tech was really ready for prime time wouldn't they have driven more than 500,000mi in six months? If they were really confident in the safety of their systems, wouldn't they have expanded this greatly?
I mean, FFS, they don't even trust their own cars to be unsupervised in the Las Vegas Loop. An enclosed, well-lit, single-lane, private access loop and they can't even automate that reliably enough.
Waymo is already doing over 250,000 weekly trips.[0] The trips average ~4mi each. With those numbers, Waymo is doing 1 million miles a week. Every week, Waymo is doing twice as many miles unsupervised than Tesla's robotaxi has done supervised in six months.
[0] https://waymo.com/sustainability/
outside1234•1w ago
culi•1w ago
Currently it's at 58 unique vehicles (based on license plates) with about 22 that haven't been seen in over a month
https://robotaxitracker.com/