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

electrek.co

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

#21

Post by sigmoid10 »

z7 wrote: 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 maximise their profits.

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

#22

Post by plqbfbv »

mikkupikku wrote: post #8

All these self driving and "drivers assistance" features like lane keeping exist to satisfy consumer demand for a way to multitask when driving. Tesla's is particularly cancerous, but all of them should be banned. I don't care how good you think your lane keeping in whatever car you have is, you won't need it if you keep your hands on the wheel, eyes on the road, and don't drive when drowsy. Turn it off and stop tryi…

Have you ever driven more than 200km at an average of 80km/h with enough turns on the highway? Perhaps after work, just to see your family once a month?

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.

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

#23

Post by lvl155 »

I am so tired of people defending Tesla. I’ve wrote off Tesla long time ago but what gets me are the people defending their tech. We all can go see the products and experience them.

The tech needs to be at least 100x more error free vs humans. It cannot be on par with human error rate.

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

#24

Post by repelsteeltje »

fabian2k wrote: post #6

As long as there are still safety drivers, the data doesn't really tell you if the AI is any good. Unless you had reliable data about the number of interventions by the driver, which I assume Tesla doesn't provide. 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…

> As long as there are still safety drivers, the data doesn't really tell you if the AI is any good.

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.

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

#25

Post by xnx »

z7 wrote: 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…

Tesla could share real/complete data at any time. The fact that they don't is likely and indicator the data does not look good.

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

#26

Post by Spooky23 »

melagonster wrote: post #13
mikkupikku wrote: post #8

All these self driving and "drivers assistance" features like lane keeping exist to satisfy consumer demand for a way to multitask when driving. Tesla's is particularly cancerous, but all of them should be banned. I don't care how good you think your lane keeping in whatever car you have is, you won't need it if you keep your hands on the wheel, eyes on the road, and don't drive when drowsy. Turn it off and stop tryi…

But this is why people bought Tesla. Musk promised that the car is automatic.

Don’t be silly. Why would a reasonable person think “Full Self Driving” meant that a car would fully drive itself?

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

#27

Post by orwin »

rich_sasha wrote: post #17

As much as I'd love to pile in on Tesla, it's unclear to me the severity of the incidents (I know they are listed) and if human drivers would report such things. "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, a…

He compared to the estimated statistics for non-reported accident (typically your example, that involve only one vehicle and only result in scratched paint) to estimate the 3x. Else the title would have been 9x (which is in line with 10x a data analyst blogger wrote ~ 3month ago).

> 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.

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

#28

Post by andrewaylett »

nkrisc wrote: post #15
mikkupikku wrote: post #8

All these self driving and "drivers assistance" features like lane keeping exist to satisfy consumer demand for a way to multitask when driving. Tesla's is particularly cancerous, but all of them should be banned. I don't care how good you think your lane keeping in whatever car you have is, you won't need it if you keep your hands on the wheel, eyes on the road, and don't drive when drowsy. Turn it off and stop tryi…

I think it’s unfair to group all those features into “things for people who want to multitask while driving”. 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 ran…

There are two layers, both relating to concentration.

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.

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

#30

Post by viraptor »

> 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. 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

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