Tesla reports another Robotaxi crash

Yet somehow they claim that old versions, using old hardware, on arbitrary roads, using untrained customers as safety drivers somehow average 2.9 million miles per collision in non-highway environments [2], a ~72.5x difference in collision frequency, and 5.1 million miles per collision in all environments, a ~175x(!) difference in collision frequency, when their reporting and data are not scrutinized.

I guess their most advanced software and hardware and professional safety drivers just make it 175x more dangerous.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2025/05/20/musk-says-teslas-self-driv...

[2] https://www.tesla.com/fsd/safety

[3] https://www.forbes.com/sites/alanohnsman/2025/08/20/elon-mus...

[3.a] Tesla own attorneys have argued that statements by Tesla executives are such nonsense that no reasonable person would believe them.

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...

https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/two-self-driving-waymos-...

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

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

In the past it took a lot less to get the situation fixed… and these were horrendous situations! [1][2] And yet tesla is a factor of 10 worse!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Pinto

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firestone_and_Ford_tire_contro...

  With 7 reported crashes at the time, Tesla’s Robotaxi was crashing roughly 
  once every 40,000 miles [...]. For comparison, the average human driver 
  in the US crashes about once every 500,000 miles. 
  This means Tesla’s “autonomous” vehicle, which is supposed to be the future of safety, 
  is crashing 10x more often than a human driver.

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 requiring repair.

My suspicion is that this is a count of accidents involving emergency vehicle or law enforcement involvement? In which case it's a pretty terrible apples/oranges comparison.

A responsible journalist with half a clue would mention that, and tell us how that distorts the numbers. If we correct for this distortion, it’s clear that the truth would come out in Tesla’s favor here.

Instead the writer embraces the distortion, trying to make Tesla look bad, and one is left to wonder if they are intentionally pushing a biased narrative.

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 suggests.