Tesla 'Robotaxi' adds 5 more crashes in Austin in a month – 4x worse than humans

https://electrek.co/2026/02/17/tesla-robotaxi-adds-5-more-crashes-austin-month-4x-worse-than-humans/

by Bender • 5 months ago

462 273 5 months ago

jackp96• 5 months 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.

malfist2• 5 months ago

If you routinely hit other objects, even at 1-4 mph, you are not a good driver.

bryanlarsen4• 5 months 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.

giyanani• 5 months 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.

rmi0• 5 months 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.

FireBeyond• 5 months ago

Doesn't matter if you're doing 4mph moving into an intersection where cross traffic is doing 35 or more.

fabian2k2• 5 months 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.

NathanKP• 5 months 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• 5 months 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.

Traster• 5 months 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_match7• 5 months 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.

zardo3• 5 months 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.

TZubiri• 5 months 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...

BoredPositron2• 5 months 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...

hamdingers3• 5 months 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?

dsf2d• 5 months 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.

SpicyLemonZest2• 5 months 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.

moralestapia3• 5 months 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

SilverElfin2• 5 months 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.

small_model3• 5 months ago

The source is a well known anti Tesla, anti Musk site, the owner has a psychotic hatred from Tesla and Elon after being a balanced click bait site for years. Ignore.

MBCook7• 5 months ago

The source is legally mandated reporting to the government.

Elecktek is just summarizing/commenting.

ralfd• 5 months ago

Electrec is not neutral commenting, it always giving any data an anti-Tesla spin.

mmooss6• 5 months ago

Every criticism is accompanied by comments attacking the messenger. Is there evidence of Elektrek's supposed bias?

small_model3• 5 months ago

You can find a detailed list of the evidence at this website https://electrek.co/

lateforwork• 5 months 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.

SilverElfin2• 5 months 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.

toomuchtodo• 5 months 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.

VTimofeenko• 5 months 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.

themafia2• 5 months 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.

MBCook7• 5 months 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.

m463• 5 months 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.

outside12343• 5 months 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.

parineum• 5 months 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.

estearum2• 5 months ago

Perhaps he's bad at his job

3rodents• 5 months 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• 5 months 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.

crazygringo• 5 months 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• 5 months 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.

tomlis• 5 months 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• 5 months 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.

ndsipa_pomu2• 5 months ago

Which is ironic as human driven vehicle collisions are so common-place that they don't even make the news.

vessenes2• 5 months 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.

margalabargala2• 5 months 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.

maxdo3• 5 months 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.

AlexandrB• 5 months 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...

LightBug12• 5 months ago

Yeah, you can get a used Tesla for a bag of chips where I am ... and I still wouldn't buy one.

malfist2• 5 months 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.

luddit3• 5 months 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.

ra75• 5 months 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”

nebula8804• 5 months 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.

vessenes2• 5 months 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.

kcb• 5 months ago

it's just HN getting baited for the 100th time by an electrek article.

arein3• 5 months ago

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.

SoftTalker• 5 months ago

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.

fabian2k2• 5 months ago

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.

pengaru• 5 months ago

It's a fusion of jazz and funk!

BirAdam• 5 months ago

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.

Veserv4• 5 months 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

WarmWash4• 5 months 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.

UltraSane3• 5 months ago

That just makes the Robotaxi even more irresponsible.

tzs4• 5 months 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.

estearum2• 5 months 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.

cma• 5 months 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?

Veserv4• 5 months 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.

everdrive• 5 months 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• 5 months 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.

helsinkiandrew• 5 months 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.

Veserv4• 5 months 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.

foxyv5• 5 months 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.

flutas2• 5 months ago

Yup as context, in the same time Waymo had 101 collisions according to the same NHTSA dataset.

thedougd• 5 months ago

I would guess the FSD numbers get help from drivers taking over during difficult situations and use weighted towards highway miles?

hwillis• 5 months ago

not to mention turning off FSD milliseconds before impact

cyberax• 5 months 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• 5 months ago

I only flip on FSD when on the highway. It has come a long way but still too many problems on local roads.

1vuio0pswjnm7• 5 months ago

Living, breathing drivers have incentives not to crash

Gigantic lithium batteries on wheels guided by WIP software do not

red75prime3• 5 months ago

The former doesn't prevent tens of thousands deaths each year.

smileson2• 5 months ago

ill stick to the bus

simondotau• 5 months ago

One of the Robotaxi “crashes” was actually a moving bus colliding into a stationary Robotaxi.

robby_w_g• 5 months ago

That's even more convincing. I wouldn't want to be in the RoboTaxi that's getting hit by a bus

hermitcrab• 5 months ago

"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.

WarmWash4• 5 months 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• 5 months 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.

JumpCrisscross3• 5 months 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• 5 months 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.

krisoft2• 5 months 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.

WarmWash4• 5 months 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• 5 months ago

Yeah, my response is to say some version of “you’re bringing anecdote knives to a statistics gunfight”

outside12343• 5 months ago

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. $$$$

ArchieScrivener2• 5 months ago

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...'

tgrowazay• 5 months ago

It is safety, regulatory and noise nightmare.

ArchieScrivener2• 5 months ago

As opposed to what, nuclear energy, airplane traffic, people directing 2 ton vehicles?

Get over your bs.

chinathrow• 5 months ago

Well, how about time to take them off the roads then?

nova22033• 5 months ago

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.

ProfessorZoom• 5 months ago

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)

LZ_Khan• 5 months ago

No, TSLA purposely does not list the details of the incident.

anonym29• 5 months ago

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.

mmooss6• 5 months ago

there aren't details being shared about each of these incidents by Electrek.
Aren't these crash details / "crash narrative" a matter of public record and investigations?

Per the OP, Tesla doesn't publish the details; all other autonomous driving manufacturers do.

jeffbee• 5 months ago

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.

maxdo3• 5 months 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.

flutas2• 5 months ago

For everyone's context, in the same time Waymo had 101 collisions according to the same dataset.

free652• 5 months 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 “

ModernMech• 5 months ago

Honestly I thought everyone was clear how this was going to go after the initial decapitation from 2016, but it seems like everyone's gonna allow these science experiments to keep causing damage until someone actually regulates them with teeth.

yieldcrv• 5 months ago

Waymo is licensing out their "Driver" software to cars that fit the specification

if Tesla drops the ego they could obtain Waymo software and track record on future Tesla hardware

legitster• 5 months ago

Also keep in mind all of the training and data and advanced image processing has only ever been trained on cities with basically perfect weather conditions for driving (maybe with the exception of fog in San Francisco).

We are still a long, long, long way off for someone to feel comfortable jumping in a FSD cab on a rainy night in in New York.

leesec6• 5 months ago

Funny to see the comments here vs the thread the other day where a Waymo hit a child.

There's no real discussion to be had on any of this. Just people coming in to confirm their biases.

As for me, I'm happy to make and take bets on Tesla beating Waymo. I've heard all these arguments a million times. Bet some money

ra75• 5 months ago

Tesla beating Waymo

Heard this for a decade now, but I’m sure this year will be different!

leesec6• 5 months ago

I didn't say this year, but lets bet on it?

sebastian_z• 5 months ago

They are not comparable. The Waymo incident involved a child who ran out from behind an SUV and into the roadway, directly in front of the Waymo [1].

[1] https://www.fastcompany.com/91491273/waymo-vehicle-hit-a-chi....

kikki• 5 months ago

I own a Tesla (and subscribe to "FSD", >70% of my miles are FSD without issue). As it stands though, Waymo is by every metric objectively better at "autonomous driving".

I would also love to see every car brand have full autonomous driving. It seems like you think you must be in one camp or another, and that one has to "beat" the other - but that's not true. Both can be successful - wouldn't that be a great world?

reitzensteinm2• 5 months ago

Sure. I'll bet you that in calendar year 2028 Waymo has more paid passenger trips than Tesla. Loser donates $1k USD to Doctors Without Borders.

I'm not a camera only doomer, and expect that in ten years Waymo will also not use Lidar, or that the units will be incredibly cheap and well integrated.

But I think the pro Tesla camp is exaggerating how quickly the march of 9s will happen for them, and underestimating and how quickly Waymo will expand in the next few years.

bdangubic2• 5 months ago

I am in on this as well and will do 10-1, I will donate $10k for any $1k pledged (would easily do 100-1 as I am sure Tesla will kill robotaxi within next 2 years “to focus on alienrobots on Moon Data Centers”)

leesec6• 5 months ago

Will happily take this bet and also happy to 10x it if you want. Would prefer we just pay each other though. You can donate my money if you want

lbrito• 5 months ago

Now imagine if all those billions in taxes had been used to build real transit infrastructure instead of subsidizing Tesla.

Muromec• 5 months ago

Your deportation papers for being a communism agitator are on the way.

pnw2• 5 months ago

Electrek is a highly biased source, the editor has a grudge against Elon and Tesla. It's really unfortunate since it used to be one of the best EV sites.

jp0d2• 5 months ago

Are the facts presented in the article incorrect?

testing223215• 5 months ago

One of them is a bus hitting a stationary Tesla - hard to paint that as the teslas fault.

A few are low speed reversing into things, the extreme majority of which done by humans are never reported and are not in the dataset comparing how many crashes Tesla have had vs humans.

I would say they’re facts, but they’re being used dishonesty

cn-watch• 5 months ago

still is the best ev site. the elon cult is every bit as bad as maga

pnw2• 5 months ago

It's not the best EV site when all of the coverage of the US market leader is so incredibly slanted due to personal politics of the editor.

pardon_me2• 5 months ago

You could say the same in reverse about HN.

rglynn• 5 months ago

In reverse? What do you mean exactly?

As someone who is neither an Elon fan nor a hater, it irks me how deranged HN is about anything Musk-related.

mmooss6• 5 months ago

Is there evidence of that? No matter who is criticizing Musk's companies, they will get slandered in one way or nother, which doesn't mean Electrek isn't biased.

Grimblewald• 5 months ago

I spew elon hate every chance I get and I maintain I am being too kind on him.

nelsonic• 5 months ago

Did anyone actually read the article before commenting? The crashes were all minor. No injuries. If anything this shows Tesla making an effort to report everything. A 2mph bump isn’t a “crash” it’s barely anything. The 17mph collision may have caused some minor damage to the “fixed object” but not clear from the article.

jp0d2• 5 months ago

A 2mph bump isn’t nothing. If it failed to stop it can trample people. It can still do damage to elderly or disabled people. The 17mph collision may have caused some minor damage to the “fixed object” but that fixed object could've been someone standing still. Tesla is not making an effort, they're doing the bare minimum.

MeetingsBrowser• 5 months ago

Did anyone actually read the article ... If anything this shows Tesla making an effort to report everything.

Meanwhile, the article if you read it

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.

whimsicalism• 5 months ago

I'm no tesla lover, but I doubt that 4mph backing into an object is something that would be reported in a human context so I'm not sure a '4x' number is really comparative vs. sensationalized.

pardon_me2• 5 months ago

I'm almost certain they aren't comparing crash statistics to the equivalent human taxi context, "professional" drivers.

ggm• 5 months ago

Given how minor these are, you think they'd get in front of the conspiracy by full disclosure.

guywithahat2• 5 months ago

This is something Electrek does regularly and isn't unique to this article but I don't like how they suggests the Tesla crash reports are doing something shady by following the reporting guidelines. Tesla is reporting things by the books, and when Electrek doesn't like how the laws are laid out they blame Tesla. Electrek wants Tesla to publish separate press notes, and since they don't they take their frustration out on the integrity of the article, which is worse for everyone.

mmooss6• 5 months ago

According to the OP, all other autonomous driving companies publish complete accident reports.

guywithahat2• 5 months ago

This is (one of) my point(s), Tesla does publish accident reports to all the major government agencies, and then those agencies make them public. Electrek wants a press packet, which Tesla isn't doing for them. In response, they try to make it sound like Tesla is shady and hiding things, or otherwise acting in some nefarious manor nobody else could think to act in. It feels disingenuous and will only serve to hurt autonomous driving optics for all companies

iknowstuff3• 5 months ago

Such slop. First, they take NHTSA SGO "crashes" which explicitly includes basically any physical impact with property damage e.g. 1–2 mph “backed into a pole/tree”.

Then they compare that numerator to Tesla’s own “minor collision” benchmark — which is not police-reported fender benders; it’s a telemetry-triggered “collision event” keyed to airbag deployment or delta-V ≥ 8 km/h. Different definitions. Completely bogus ratio.

Any comparison to police-reported crashes is hilariously stupid for obvious reasons.

On top of that, the denominator is hand-waved ("~800k paid miles extrapolated"), which is extra sketchy because SGO crashes can happen during non-paid repositioning/parking while "paid miles" excludes those segments. And we’re talking 14 events in one geofenced, early rollout in Austin so your confidence interval is doing backflips. If you want a real claim vs humans, do matched Austin exposure, same reportable-crash criteria, severity stratification, and show uncertainty bands.

But what you get instead is clickbait so stop falling for this shit please HN.

DivingForGold• 5 months ago

Elon discarded any thoughts of LiDAR years ago. Motor Trend said the lack of LiDAR and reliance on cameras has led to specific, recurring issues that critics argue make it less "practical" for true, unsupervised autonomy.

bdangubic2• 5 months ago

at this point much bigger news story might be “robotaxi made it from point A to point B in a straight line on a vacant parking lot (supervised)”

DoesntMatter22• 5 months ago

Not too bad. It’ll only improve from here and some of the accidents are reversing into poles and what not. Most of which isn’t counted in human accidents.

jgalt212• 5 months ago

TSLA investors don't care (as long as Musk is still there to keep them believing). Years of bad news, and the stock is only 10% off it's all time highs.

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/TSLA/

TheAlchemist• 5 months ago

So, are we at 50% of US population, without the safety drivers, before end of 2025 yet ?

The sheer scale and financial consequences (once it implodes) of Tesla scam are unprecedented.

While the word 'crash' seem a bit strong here, keep in mind, as the article mention, that Tesla is volountarily redacting all the details. The company was recently found to deliberately lying about the availability of the data in a death case, and ordered to pay >$200 million.

senectus1• 5 months ago

wait, i thought there were none anywhere? that the promised taxis never arrived?

throwaway81523• 5 months ago

And they're making them without steering wheels now! I'm sure there's a saying about that.

https://electrek.co/2026/02/17/tesla-rolls-first-steering-wh...

Tesla 'Robotaxi' adds 5 more crashes in Austin in a month – 4x worse than humans

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