Tesla's Robotaxi data confirms crash rate 3x worse than humans even with monitor
by breve on 1/30/2026, 10:14:31 AM
Comments
by: z7
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.<p>There's also a denominator problem. The mileage figure appears to be cumulative miles "as of November," while the crashes are drawn from a specific July-November window in Austin. It's not clear that those miles line up with the same geography and time period.<p>The sample size is tiny (nine crashes), uncertainty is huge, and the analysis doesn't distinguish between at-fault and not-at-fault incidents, or between preventable and non-preventable ones.<p>Also, the comparison to Waymo is stated without harmonizing crash definitions and reporting practices.
1/30/2026, 11:21:16 AM
by: SilverBirch
To be honest I think the true story here is:<p>> the fleet has traveled approximately 500,000 miles<p>Let's say they average 10mph, and say they operate 10 hours a day, that's 5,000 car-days of travel, or to put it another way about 30 cars over 6 months.<p>That's tiny! That's a robotaxi company that is literally smaller than a lot of taxi companies.<p>One crash in this context is going to just completely blow out their statistics. So it's kind of dumb to even talk about the statistics today. The real take away is that the Robotaxis don't really exist, they're in an experimental phase and we're not going to get real statistics until they're doing 1,000x that mileage, and that won't happen until they've built something that actually works and that may never happen.
1/30/2026, 10:40:05 AM
by: sammyjoe72
Elon promised self driving cars in 12 months back in 2017? He’s also promising Optimus robots doing surgery on humans in 3 years? Extrapolating…………… Optimus is going to kill some humans and it will all be worth it!
1/30/2026, 12:09:18 PM
by: mikkupikku
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 trying to delegate your responsibility for what your two ton speeding death machine does!
1/30/2026, 11:29:50 AM
by: viraptor
> showing cumulative robotaxi miles, the fleet has traveled approximately 500,000 miles as of November 2025.<p>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.<p>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)<p>Edit: feel free to actually respond to the claim rather than downvote
1/30/2026, 12:10:12 PM
by: fabian2k
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.<p>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, I'm not inclined to give them any benefit of the doubt here.
1/30/2026, 11:12:35 AM
by: artembugara
By the law of large numbers, it's not a significant distance.
1/30/2026, 11:04:24 AM
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1/30/2026, 10:45:20 AM
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.<p>The tech needs to be at least 100x more error free vs humans. It cannot be on par with human error rate.
1/30/2026, 11:55:10 AM
by: onetokeoverthe
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1/30/2026, 11:50:45 AM
by: rich_sasha
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.<p>"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?<p>By my own subjective count, only three descriptions sound unambiguously bad, and only one mentions a "minor injury".<p>I'm not saying it's great, and I can imagine Tesla being selective in publishing, but based on this I wouldn't say it seems dire.<p>For example, roundabouts in cities (in Europe anyway) tend to <i>increase</i> the number of crashes, but they are overall of <i>lower severity</i>, leading to an overall improvement of safety. Judging by TFA <i>alone</i> I can't tell this isn't the case here. I can imagine a robotaxi having a different distribution of frequency and severity of accidents than a human driver.
1/30/2026, 11:47:12 AM