this post was submitted on 17 Feb 2026
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Self-driving cars are often marketed as safer than human drivers, but new data suggests that may not always be the case.

Citing data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), Electrek reports that Tesla disclosed five new crashes involving its robotaxi fleet in Austin. The new data raises concerns about how safe Tesla’s systems really are compared to the average driver.

The incidents included a collision with a fixed object at 17 miles per hour, a crash with a bus while the Tesla vehicle was stopped, a crash with a truck at four miles per hour, and two cases where Tesla vehicles backed into fixed objects at low speeds.

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[–] itsathursday@lemmy.world 156 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Optical recognition is inferior and this is not surprising.

[–] slevinkelevra@sh.itjust.works 77 points 1 month ago (4 children)

Yeah that's well known by now. However, safety through additional radar sensors costs money and they can't have that.

[–] tomalley8342@lemmy.world 80 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Nah, that one's on Elon just being a stubborn bitch and thinking he knows better than everybody else (as usual).

[–] ageedizzle@piefed.ca 24 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (8 children)

He's right in that if current AI models were genuinely intelligent in the way humans are then cameras would be enough to achieve at least human level driving skills. The problem of course is that AI models are not nearly at that level yet

[–] T156@lemmy.world 58 points 1 month ago (6 children)

Even if they were, would it not be better to give the car better senses?

Humans don't have LIDAR because we can't just hook something into a human's brain and have it work. If you can do that with a self-driving car, why cut it down to human senses?

[–] 48954246@lemmy.world 35 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Exactly, with this logic why have motors or wheels?

You don't have wheels so you shouldn't use cars

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[–] Clent@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 points 1 month ago (3 children)

Cameras are inferior to human vision in many ways. Especially the ones used on Teslas.

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[–] CheeseNoodle@lemmy.world 8 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Also the Human brain is still on par with some of the worlds best supercomputers, I doubt a Tesla has that much onboard processing power.

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[–] paraphrand@lemmy.world 36 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

just one more AI model, please, that’ll do it, just one more, just you wait, have you seen how fast things are improving? Just one more. Common, just one more…

[–] NotASharkInAManSuit@lemmy.world 8 points 1 month ago

I NEED ONE MORE FACKIN’ AI MODEL!!

[–] parzival@lemmy.org 10 points 1 month ago

I'm not too sure it's about cost, it seems to be about Elon not wanting to admit he was wrong, as he made a big point of lidar being useless

[–] halcyoncmdr@piefed.social 8 points 1 month ago (13 children)

I don't think it's necessarily about cost. They were removing sensors both before costs rose and supply became more limited with things like the tariffs.

Too many sensors also causes issues, adding more is not an easy fix. Sensor Fusion is a notoriously difficult part of robotics. It can help with edge cases and verification, but it can also exacerbate issues. Sensors will report different things at some point. Which one gets priority? Is a sensor failing or reporting inaccurate data? How do you determine what is inaccurate if the data is still within normal tolerances?

More on topic though... My question is why is the robotaxi accident rate different from the regular FSD rate? Ostensibly they should be nearly identical.

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[–] Blackmist@feddit.uk 65 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Wow, thank goodness nobody gutted the authority in charge of making sure that wouldn't happen...

https://www.theverge.com/news/646797/nhtsa-staffers-office-vehicle-automation-safety-firing-doge-tesla

[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 16 points 1 month ago (5 children)

The AI companies put out a presser a few years back that said "Um, aktuly, its the humans who are bad drivers" and everyone ate that shit up with a spoon.

So now you've got Waymos blowing through red lights and getting stuck on train tracks, because "fuck you fuck you stop fighting the innovation we're creatively disruptive we do what we want".

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[–] roofuskit@lemmy.world 64 points 1 month ago
[–] Bishma@discuss.tchncs.de 44 points 1 month ago (1 children)

They'll work perfectly as soon as AI space data center robots go to Mars. I'd say a Robovan will be able to tow a roadster from New York to Hong Kong by... probably July. July or November at the latest.

[–] treesapx@lemmy.world 9 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I really fucking hate how his fans can just listen to him lie like this over and over and it doesn't affect their opinion of him. I remember falling for it a couple times before I started asking "Is this like the last time you promised dates?"

By that time it was a moot point, however, because that "pedo guy" comment was just around the corner. Now anyone who likes him after that needs to go to therapy to figure out a few things.

I won't comment on people who support him after the other things.

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[–] ramenshaman@lemmy.world 39 points 1 month ago (3 children)

Use lidar you ketamine saturated motherfucker

[–] Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In@lemmy.world 11 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Can't do that. Then he would have to upgrade all legacy cars. And he is missing the lidar dataset.

[–] ramenshaman@lemmy.world 11 points 1 month ago (2 children)

The best time to add lidar would have been years ago, the second best time is right now. I don't think he would have to update the old cars, it could just be part of the hardware V5 package. He's obviously comfortable with having customers beta testing production vehicles so he can start creating a lidar set now or he can continue failing to make reliable self-driving cars.

[–] matlag@sh.itjust.works 7 points 1 month ago

Agree, but since he stated multiple time that all cars since xxx years were hardware capable of L5 self-driving next year (no need to precise the year, the statement is repeated every year), adding LIDAR now would be opening the way to a major class action. So he painted himself in a corner, and like all gigantic-ego idiots, he doubles down every time he's asked.

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[–] Frenchgeek@lemmy.ml 8 points 1 month ago

But then he would have to admit being wrong for removing radar...

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[–] SatansMaggotyCumFart@piefed.world 24 points 1 month ago (1 children)
[–] MedicPigBabySaver@lemmy.world 23 points 1 month ago (1 children)
[–] ToTheGraveMyLove@sh.itjust.works 11 points 1 month ago (4 children)
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[–] Paranoidfactoid@lemmy.world 21 points 1 month ago

Clearly, AI isn't just challenging human performance, it's exceeding it. Four times the crash rate is just the beginning. Just imagine the crash rate when super intelligence comes!

🚘💥🚗

[–] dogslayeggs@lemmy.world 21 points 1 month ago (13 children)

It's important to draw the line between what Tesla is trying to do and what Waymo is actually doing. Tesla has a 4x higher rate, but Waymo has a lower rate.

[–] merc@sh.itjust.works 14 points 1 month ago (22 children)

Not just lower, a tiny fraction of the human rate of accidents:

https://waymo.com/safety/impact/

Also, AFAIK this includes cases when the Waymo car isn't even slightly at fault. Like, there have been 2 deaths involving a Waymo car. In one case a motorcyclist hit the car from behind, flipped over it, then was hit by another car and killed. In the other case, ironically, the real car at fault was a Tesla being driven by a human who claims he experienced "sudden unintended acceleration". It was driving at 98 miles per hour in downtown SF and hit a bunch of stopped cars at a red light, then spun into oncoming traffic and killed a man and his dog who were in another car.

Whether or not self-driving cars are a good thing is up for debate. But, it must suck to work at Waymo and to be making safety a major focus, only to have Tesla ruin the market by making people associate self-driving cars with major safety issues.

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[–] ThirdConsul@lemmy.zip 10 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

Isn't Waymo rate better because they are very particular where they operate? When they are asked to operate in sligthly less than perfect conditions it immediately goes downhill https://www.researchgate.net/publication/385936888_Identifying_Research_Gaps_through_Self-Driving_Car_Data_Analysis (page 7, Uncertainty)

Edit: googled it a bit, and apparently Waymo mostly drives in

Waymo vehicles primarily drive on urban streets with a speed limit of 35 miles per hour or less

Teslas do not.

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[–] lechekaflan@lemmy.world 20 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I do (sarcastically) love knowing Leave the World Behind is a documentary.

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[–] NachBarcelona@piefed.social 16 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Even for the first piss poor epigone of Neuromancer, the name "Robotaxi" would've been laughed at.

Mulon Esk made the dumbest name happen for the xth time.

[–] Bazoogle@lemmy.world 10 points 1 month ago (2 children)

a crash with a bus while the Tesla vehicle was stopped

Okay, idk why we would blame this one on the self driving car...

a collision with a heavy truck at 4 mph, and two separate incidents where the Tesla backed into objects, one into a pole or tree at 1 mph and another into a fixed object at 2 mph.

original source

The difference is a lot of these are never reported when it's done by a human driver. I very highly doubt the rate is 4x higher than humans. I'm not saying the self driving cars are good. I am just saying human drivers are really bad.

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[–] HarneyToker@lemmy.world 10 points 1 month ago (7 children)

Got this saved next time someone tells me that a robot can drive better than a human. They almost had me there, but data doesn’t lie. 

[–] Buddahriffic@lemmy.world 8 points 1 month ago

A robot can theoretically drive better than a human because emotions and boredom don't have to be involved. But we aren't there yet and Teslas are trying to solve the hard mode of pure vision without range finding.

Also, I suspect that the ones we have are set up purely as NNs where everything is determined by the training, which likely means there's some random-ass behaviour for rare edge cases where it "thinks" slamming on the accelerator is as good an option as anything else but since it's a black box no one really understands, there's no way to tell until someone ends up in that position.

The tech still belongs in universities, not on public roads as a commercial product/service. Certainly not by the type of people who would at any point say, "fuck it, good enough, ship it like that", which seems to be most of the tech industry these days.

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[–] ExcessShiv@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 points 1 month ago (2 children)

a crash with a bus while the Tesla vehicle was stopped

Uuh...wouldn't that be the fault of the bus? I mean, the system is faulty as fuck so there's really no need to mix in shit like this, it reduces legitimacy of the otherwise very valid criticism.

[–] duncan_bayne@lemmy.world 17 points 1 month ago (5 children)

That depends entirely where the Tesla stopped, and under what conditions.

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[–] betterdeadthanreddit@lemmy.world 9 points 1 month ago (4 children)

They're 4 times as capable ~of~ ~crashing~ as a human driver. How efficient!

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[–] db2@lemmy.world 9 points 1 month ago
[–] ImgurRefugee114@reddthat.com 8 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

This is a really funny thing to see a few scrolls down from an article about Tesla's first drivingwheelless vehicle and finally "solving autonomous driving"

[–] spacebread98@lemmy.zip 7 points 1 month ago

I thought ai was going to replace all jobs in a year and a half

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