Live data from Hacker News

Tesla’s autonomous vehicles are crashing at a rate much higher tha human drivers

electrek.co

131–140 of 286 posts

Re: Tesla’s autonomous vehicles are crashing at a rate much higher tha human drivers

#131
post #7

The comparison isn't really like-for-like. NHTSA SGO AV reports can include very minor, low-speed contact events that would often never show up as police-reported crashes for human drivers, meaning the Tesla crash count may be drawing from a broader category than the human baseline it's being compared to. There's also a denominator problem. The mileage figure appears to be cumulative miles "as of November," while the…

oh hacker news, never change. "crashes 3x as much as human driven cars" but is that REALLY bad? who knows? pure gold

Re: Tesla’s autonomous vehicles are crashing at a rate much higher tha human drivers

#132
post #7

The comparison isn't really like-for-like. NHTSA SGO AV reports can include very minor, low-speed contact events that would often never show up as police-reported crashes for human drivers, meaning the Tesla crash count may be drawing from a broader category than the human baseline it's being compared to. There's also a denominator problem. The mileage figure appears to be cumulative miles "as of November," while the…

I've actually started ignoring all these reports. There is so much bad faith going on in self-driving tech on all sides, it is nearly impossible to come up with clean and controlled data, much less objective opinions. At this point the only thing I'd be willing to base an opinion on is if insurers ask for higher (or lower) rates for self-driving. Because then I can be sure they have the data and did the math right to…

Thank you. Everyone is hiding disengagement and settling to hide accidents. This will not be fixed or standardized without changes to the laws, which for self driving have been largely written by the handful of companies in the space. Total, complete regulatory capture.

Re: Tesla’s autonomous vehicles are crashing at a rate much higher tha human drivers

#133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's fair to put the burden of proof here on Tesla. They should convince people that their Robotaxis are safe. If they redact the details about all incidents so that you cannot figure out who's at fault, that's on Tesla alone.

While I think Tesla should be transparent, this article doesn't really make sure it is comparing apples to apples either. 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.

It’s not weird. They have a history of over promising to the point that one could say they just straight up lie on a regular basis. The bar is higher for them because they have abused the public’s trust and it has to be earned again.

The results have to speak for Tesla very loudly and very clearly. And so far they don’t.

Re: Tesla’s autonomous vehicles are crashing at a rate much higher tha human drivers

#134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

happymellon is not trying to sell you a̵ ̵b̵r̵i̵d̵g̵e̵ a self driving car though.

If a company wants to sell you something, but wants to block access to information, the default position for everyone should be "it's probably because it's bad".

If I have an investment fund and I refuse to tell you about the current performance, I hope you would be sceptical.

If I try to sell you medicine and redact the information about whether it does what I claim, and block you from seeing how many people were poisoned from taking it, I hope that everyone would refuse to take it.

The insanity I'm seeing here from Tesla defenders is amazing. I can only assume they've fully bought in to the vision and tied assets to it and refuse to acknowledge that they might lose everything.

Re: Tesla’s autonomous vehicles are crashing at a rate much higher tha human drivers

#135

> showing cumulative robotaxi miles, the fleet has traveled approximately 500,000 miles as of November 2025. 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.…

It's always possible to deny the relevancy of a comparison based on some quality of the compared data. The autonomous car pilot trials will be by their very nature restriced to some locations, with specific weather patterns, etc., so even after the mileage will be 1000x of the current one there will be still options.

At which point will the comparison be considered relevant?

Re: Tesla’s autonomous vehicles are crashing at a rate much higher tha human drivers

#136
post #128
post #81

Tesla has completely fumbled a spectacular lead in EVs and managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. And instead of turning it around, we're supposed to believe they are going to completely pivot and then take over a market with far more developed competitors (e.g. Boston Dynamics). That Elon is riding this wave amidst the transparency of the whole thing is the funniest part. It's like watching people lose m…

I'm not sure how defensible the lead was. The only reason BYD isn't the only game in town is tariffs. The pivot to Optimus is ridiculous though. They can't get a car to drive truly autonomously after more than a decade and they want to expand the degrees of freedom?

Tesla had a good brand image in the early 2010, they could have positioned themselves like the quality/luxury brand for EV and have people buy Tesla for the brand itself like people do for Apple.

Instead they let Elon made their brand so toxic people are actively avoiding it.

Re: Tesla’s autonomous vehicles are crashing at a rate much higher tha human drivers

#137
post #130
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

electrek.co has a beef with Tesla, at least in the recent years.

Absolutely. Let's examine the Elektrek editor's feed, to understand how "impartial" he is about Tesla: https://x.com/FredLambert

Yup.

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.

Re: Tesla’s autonomous vehicles are crashing at a rate much higher tha human drivers

#138

To be honest I think the true story here is: > 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 stat…

Wait, so your argument is there's only 9 crashes so we should wait until there's possibly 9,000 crashes to make an assessment? That's crazy dangerous. 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.

No, my argument is you shouldn't draw a statistical conclusion with this data. That's all. I'm kind of pushing in the direction you were pointing in the second part - it's not enough data to make statistical inferences. We should examine each incident, identify the root cause and come to a conclusion as to whether that means the system is not fit for purpose. I just don't think the statistics are useful.

Re: Tesla’s autonomous vehicles are crashing at a rate much higher tha human drivers

#139
post #53

To be honest I think the true story here is: > 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 stat…

But deep learning is also about statistics. So if the crash statistics are insufficient, then we cannot trust the deep learning.

I suspect Tesla claims they do the deep learning on sensor data from their entire fleet of cars sold, not just the robotaxis.

Re: Tesla’s autonomous vehicles are crashing at a rate much higher tha human drivers

#140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>One crash in this context is going to just completely blow out their statistics. 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 d…

> 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'm not sure if that leads to the conclusion that you want it to.

From the tone, it seems that the poster's sister is a particularly bad driver (or at least they believe her to be). While having an autonomous car that can drive as well as even a bad human driver is definitely a major accomplishment technologically, we all know that threshold was passed a long time ago. However, if Tesla's robotaxis (with human monitors on board, let's not forget - these are not fully autonomous cars like Waymo's!) are at best as good as some of the worse human drivers, then they have no business being allowed on public roads. Remember that human drivers can also lose their license if [caught] driving too poorly.
Post reply on HN