Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Tesla reports another Robotaxi crash

electrek.co

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 165 posts

Re: Tesla reports another Robotaxi crash

#71

Post by furyofantares »

ajross wrote: post #31

FTA: "For comparison, the average human driver in the US crashes about once every 500,000 miles." Does anyone know what the cite for this might be? I'm coming up empty. To my knowledge, no one (except maybe insurance companies) tallies numbers for fender bender style accidents. This seems like a weirdly high number to me, it's very rare to find any vehicle that reaches 100k miles without at least one bump or two requ…

> This seems like a weirdly high number to me, it's very rare to find any vehicle that reaches 100k miles without at least one bump or two requiring repair.

It goes seem like a high number to me - in 30 years of pretty heavy driving I've probably done about 500k miles and I've definitely had more than one incident. But not THAT many more than one, and I've put 100k miles on a few vehicles with zero incidents. Most of my incidents were when I was a newer driver who drove fairly recklessly.

Re: Tesla reports another Robotaxi crash

#73

Post by dyauspitr »

goosejuice wrote: post #53
dyauspitr wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a solved problem. Many people I know including myself use Waymo’s on a weekly basis. They are rock solid. Waymo has pretty unequivocally solved the problem. There is no wait and see.

Nevermind the Waymos rolling by stopped school busses. https://www.npr.org/2025/12/06/nx-s1-5635614/waymo-school-bu...

You can cavil about this but it’s weak.

Re: Tesla reports another Robotaxi crash

#74

Post by _ea1k »

I spent a little bit of time poking at Gemini to see what it thought the accident rate in an urban area like Austin would be, including unreported minor cases. It estimated 2-3/100k miles. This is still lower than the extrapolation in the article, but maybe not notably lower.

We need far higher quality data than this to reach meaningful conclusions. Implying conclusions based upon this extrapolation is irresponsible.

Re: Tesla reports another Robotaxi crash

#75

Post by cameldrv »

guywithahat wrote: post #15
TheAmazingRace wrote: post #4

When you have a CEO like Elon who swears up and down that you only need cameras for autonomous driving vehicles, and skimping out on crucial extras like Li-DAR, can anyone be surprised by this result? Tesla also likes to take the motto of "move fast and break things" to a fault.

The more I've looked into the topic the less I think the removal of lidar was a cost issue. I think there are a lot of benefits to simplifying your sensor tech stack, and while I won't pretend to know the best solution removing things like lidar and ultrasonic sensors seem to have been a decision about improving performance. By doubling down on cameras your technical team can remain focused on certain sensor technolo…

Honestly I think it's more that he was backed into a corner. The Teslas from ~9 years ago when they first started selling "full self driving" as an option, had some OK cameras and, by modern standards, a very crappy radar.

The radar they had really couldn't detect stationary objects. It relied on the doppler effect to look for moving objects. That would work most of the time, but sometimes there would be a stationary object in the road, and then the computer vision system would have to make a decision, and unfortunately in unusual situations like a firetruck parked at an angle to block off a crash site, the Tesla would plow into the firetruck.

Given that the radar couldn't really ever be reliable enough to create a self driving vehicle, after he hired Karpathy, Elon became convinced that the only way to meet the promise was to just ignore the radar and get the computer vision up to enough reliability to do FSD. By Tesla's own admission now, the hardware on those 2016+ vehicles is not adequate to do the job.

All of that is to say that IMO Elon's primary reason for his opinions about Lidar are simply because those older cars didn't have one, and he had promised to deliver FSD on that hardware, and therefore it couldn't be necessary, or he'd go broke paying out lawsuits. We will see what happens with the lawsuits.

Re: Tesla reports another Robotaxi crash

#76

Post by dang »

natch wrote: post #24
TheAmazingRace wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last I checked, Robotaxi has a safety driver, whereas Waymo is completely self driving, yet has a very good safety record. That speaks volumes to me. https://waymo.com/safety/impact/

[flagged]

Could you please not post in the flamewar style to HN? We're trying for something else here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Tesla reports another Robotaxi crash

#77

Post by pavon »

ajross wrote: post #31

FTA: "For comparison, the average human driver in the US crashes about once every 500,000 miles." Does anyone know what the cite for this might be? I'm coming up empty. To my knowledge, no one (except maybe insurance companies) tallies numbers for fender bender style accidents. This seems like a weirdly high number to me, it's very rare to find any vehicle that reaches 100k miles without at least one bump or two requ…

This NHTSA report agrees with those numbers[1]. It reports 6,138,359 crashes and 3,246,817,000,000 Vehicle Miles Traveled in the US for 2023, which comes to about 530k miles per crash. The data comes from FARS which only reports fatalities, and CRSS which only includes crashes reported to the police[2]. It also only includes crashes on roadways (or from cars driving off roadways), not parking lots and other private property.

[1] https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...

[2] https://www.nhtsa.gov/crash-data-systems/crash-report-sampli...

Re: Tesla reports another Robotaxi crash

#78

Post by kstenerud »

There's a lot of editorializing going on. Now that the title has been restored, hopefully things calm down a bit.

Ultimately, Tesla has two problems going on here:

1. Their crash rate is 2x that of Waymo.

2. They redact a lot of key information, which complicates safety assessments of their fleet.

The redactions actually hurt Tesla, because the nature of each road incident really matters: EVERY traffic incident must be reported, regardless of fault (even if it's a speeding car from the other direction that hits another vehicle which then hits the robotaxi - yes, that's actually in one of the Waymo NHTSA incident reports). When Tesla redacts the way they've been doing, it makes it very difficult to do studies like https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15389588.2025.2... which show how much safer Waymo vehicles are compared to humans WHEN IT COMES TO ACTUAL DAMAGE DONE.

We can't get that quality of info from Tesla due to their redaction practices. All we can reliably glean is that Tesla vehicles are involved in 2x the incidents per mile compared to Waymo. https://ilovetesla.com/teslas-robotaxi-dilemma-navigating-cr...

Re: Tesla reports another Robotaxi crash

#79

Post by 93po »

verteu wrote: post #41
tigranbs wrote: post #16

IMHO, this is not too bad! But obviously, coming from the software product industry, everyone knows that building features isn't the same as operating in practice and optimizing based on the use case, which takes a ton of time. Waymo has a huge head start, and it is evident that the "fully autonomous" robotaxi date is far behind what Elon is saying publicly. They will do it, but it is not as close as the hype suggest…

It's pretty bad given there's a Tesla employee behind the wheel supervising.

There's no evidence the supervisor was behind the wheel for any of these, and I've never seen footage at all where they werent in the passenger seat

Re: Tesla reports another Robotaxi crash

#80

Post by themafia »

daheza wrote: post #34
themafia wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Completely self driving? Don't they go into a panic mode, stop the vehicle, then call back to a central location where a human driver can take remote control of the vehicle? They've been seen doing this at crime scenes and in the middle of police traffic stops. That speaks volumes too.

Incorrect humans never take over the controls. An operator is presented with a set of options and they choose one, which the car then performs. The human is never in direct control of the vehicle. If this process fails then they send a physical human to drive the car.

> humans never take over the controls

> presented with a set of options and they choose one

> they send a physical human to drive the car.

Those all sound like "controls" to me.

"Fleet response can influence the Waymo Driver's path, whether indirectly through indicating lane closures, explicitly requesting the AV use a particular lane, or, in the most complex scenarios, explicitly proposing a path for the vehicle to consider. "

https://waymo.com/blog/2024/05/fleet-response/

So they built new controls that typical vehicles don't have. Then they use them. I fail to see how any of this is "incorrect." It is, in fact, _built in_ to the system from the ground up.

Semantic games aside, it is obviously more incorrect to call them "completely self driving" especially when they "ask for help." Do human drivers do this while driving?

Post reply on HN