Electrek notoriously lies and fibs and stretches the truth to hate on Tesla and Elon as much as possible when it serves their own best interests.
This one is misleading both in that 8 "crashes" is statistically insignificant to draw conclusions as to its safety compared to humans, but also because these 'crashes' are not actually crashes and instead a variety of things, including hitting a wild animal of unknown size or potentially minor contact with other objects of unspecified impact strength.
They make other unsubstantiated and likely just wrong claims:
> The most critical detail that gets lost in the noise is that these crashes are happening with a human safety supervisor in the driver’s seat (for highway trips) or passenger seat, with a finger on a kill switch.
The robotaxi supervisors are overwhelmingly only the passenger seat - I've never actually seen any video footage of them in the driver seat, and Electrek assuredly has zero evidence of how many of the reported incidents involved someone in the driver seat. Additionally, these supervisors in the passenger seat are not instructed to prevent every single incident (they arent going to emergency brake for a squirrel) and to characterize them as "babysitting to prevent accidents" is just wrong.
This article is full of other glaring problems and lies and mistruths but it's genuinely not worth the effort to write 5 pages on it.
If you want some insight on why Fed Lambert might be doing this, look no further than the bottom of the page: Fred gives (sells?) "investment tips" which, you guessed it, are perpetually trying to convince people to sell and short Telsa: https://x.com/FredLambert/status/1831731982868369419
Feel free to look at his other posts: it's 95% trying to convince people that Telsa is going bankrupt tomorrow, and trying to slam Elon as much as possible - sometimes for good reasons (transphobia) but sometimes in ways that really harms his credibility, if he actually had any
Lambert has also been accused of astrotrufing in lawsuits, and had to go through a settlement that required him to retract all the libel he had spread: https://www.thedrive.com/tech/21838/the-truth-behind-electre...
That same source also touches on Fred and Seth's long history of swinging either side of the bandwagon in attempts to maximize personal gain off bullshit reporting. And basically being a massive joke in automotive reporting.
The owner of Eletrek, Seth Weintraub, also notably does the same thing: https://x.com/llsethj/status/1217198837212884993