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The point I soured on Musk was when he ditched radar/lidar and tried to go with camera's alone. This made me realize he is not the genius he is made out to be but instead he is a fraud/charlatan and over the years his statements on different topics have only hardened that belief. Why the fuck would you want ai cars to be the same as humans you should want them to be many times better and radarr/lidar sonarr type tech make them better

This problem has been solved more than a decade ago by radar sensors (standard on many mid-range cars at the time). They detect imminent collisions with almost perfect accuracy and very little false positives. Having better sensor data is always going to beat trying to massage crappy data into something useful.

I’m normally quite skeptical of these kinds of “Tesla More Dangerous Than Other Brands” headlines since they tend to be B.S.

But this seems like a pretty legitimate accusation, and certainly a well researched write-up at the very least.

It’s already anxious enough sharing the road with American drivers as a bicyclist. Now I have to worry about awful TSLA tech just not working or detecting me.

Maybe wouldn’t be an issue if bike infrastructure was separate from car traffic. Or USA had even a fraction of the foresight as the NL when it came to transportation infrastructure.

Everyone comparing autonomous vehicles to non autonomous vehicles and number of accidents misses one important impediment to people’s and the government’s acceptance of accidents for the former.

Currently over 40K people are killed in the US every year from automobile fatalities and people think that’s just the price we pay for driving. I am not making a value judgement about that statistic.

But if even 1 person dies because of an autonomous vehicle fatality, there are going to be investigations and experience is that the entire platform is going to be paused.

Besides who is liable for an autonomous vehicle fatality? Is Tesla going to assume liability as the “driver”? Are insurance companies?

On the other hand, Tesla is not exactly known for reliability.

https://insideevs.com/news/731559/tesla-least-reliable-used-...

And its owner is not exactly known for honesty.

This article does not adjust for the fact that Teslas drive many more miles on Autopilot + FSD than any other brand. So it's a pretty worthless comparison.

The average human eye has 10,000,000 X the dynamic range of even the finest broadcast video camera. So, when the Sun is low on the horizon, all Teslas are effectively blind. Lidar is good, until you get more than one of them in an area. Then the lidars totally interfere with each other resulting in total chaos. Self driving anything is just not ready yet, and won't be for a long time.

This does not bode well for the Tesla robotaxi pilot launching soon. Depending on how that goes, Q2/Q3 could be a bloodbath for Tesla and I'm sure he knows it.

This is exactly why I don't trust FSD in stop and go traffic. The follow distance is too close on some versions where it will accelerate hard and start braking around 10 feet. One misstep and that's a rear end. The latest version is better, where I feel more confident with it's easing, but there's constantly regressions where it goes back to an aggressive braking where I'm always afraid it'll rear end the other driver.

Okay lots of discussion on how the stats were collected

My question is this: would Teslas be improved with Lidar?

I see a lot of people saying that this isn't statistically significant. I think that that is probably true, but I also think that it is important to do the statistical test to make sure:

    tesla.mult = c(1/(5:2),1:5)
    data.frame(tesla.mult = tesla.mult, p.value = sapply(tesla.mult, (function(tesla.mult) { poisson.test(c(5, 0), c(tesla.mult, 1))$p.value })))

      tesla.mult      p.value
    1  0.2000000 0.0001286008
    2  0.2500000 0.0003200000
    3  0.3333333 0.0009765625
    4  0.5000000 0.0041152263
    5  1.0000000 0.0625000000
    6  2.0000000 0.1769547325
    7  3.0000000 0.3408203125
    8  4.0000000 0.5904000000
    9  5.0000000 1.0000000000

tesla.mult is how many times more total miles Teslas have driven with level-2 ADAS engaged compared to all other makers. We don't have data for what that number should be because automakers are not required to report it. I think that it is probably somewhere between 1/5 and 5. If you believe that the number is more than 1, then the result is not statistically significant.

NHTSA Report ID 13781-3470 in Florida, April 2022 is most likely the fatal motorcycle crash Tesla influencer Chuck Cook was involved in as mentioned in his video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8B0pX8TSOk

In the video Chuck Cook states he was involved in a fatal motorcycle accident in Florida in April 2022 where the motorcycle wheel fell off and then careened into his Tesla while Navigate on Autopilot was engaged. The reporting source for that NHTSA incident is "Field Report" and "Media" which lines up with his statement that a Florida Highway Patrol officer reviewed the footage and that Tesla most likely first learned of the crash from Chuck Cook's page classified as "media".

If the incident was not the crash involving Chuck Cook, then Chuck Cook's crash would be a crash that Tesla has left illegally unreported as I can see no other identifiable crash that could correspond to Chuck Cook's crash.

Prediction: over the next 4 years we're going to see lots of stories like this. Some of the stories will be fair, some won't. "Musk bad" stories get clicks. The next administration will be very anti-Tesla. Coincidentally, by that time self-driving will be considered mature enough to warrant proper regulation, rather than the experimental regulation status we have now.

Combine the two, and the regulations will be written such that it excludes Tesla and includes Waymo. Not by name, just that the safety regulations will require a safety record better than Tesla's but worse than Waymo's. Likely nobody but Waymo will have that record, and now nobody will be able to because they won't have access to the public roads to attain it.

This might be the ultimate regulatory lock in monopoly we've ever seen.

I've never been a motorcyclist, but I've been told by one: Just remember, on a motorcycle, you're invisible. Didn't think that would ever be literally true.

Just think of the liability you would have if your Tesla hit someone.

It is crazy that me that anyone trusts FSD given the downside.

The other comment pointing this out has been (ridiculously) flagged, so I'll repeat the point that was made:

The analysis is useless if it doesn't account for the base rate fallacy (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy)

The first thing I thought before even reading the analysis was "Does the author account for it?" And indeed he makes no mention that he did.

So after reading the whole article I have no idea whether Tesla's automatic driving is any worse at detecting motorcycles than my Subaru's (which BTW also uses only visual sensors).

Antidisclaimer: I hate both Teslas and Musk. And my hate for one is not tied to the other.

I don't like Tesla and the premature "FSD" announcement was a huge set back AV research. An AV without lidar killing motorcyclists is not surprising, to say the least. And this is a damning report.

That said -- and I might have missed this if it was in the linked sources, I'm on mobile -- what is the breakdown of other (supposed) AVs adoption currently? What other types of crashes are there? Are these 5+ fatalities statistically significant?

When I used to ride, getting rear ended at a stop was one of my biggest fears other than people blowing stop signs. I always left more space in front of me that would give me room to maneuver as I watched for the car behind me to make the stop.

Whether you like Tesla or not: this blog post is a perfect example of how clickbait headlines twist things around. Nobody reads anymore - if you made it down to the nitty gritty of each actual example, it’s painfully obvious that many have almost nothing to do with the self driving software at all, other than how humans can interact with it to screw it all up. There’s:

- A drunk driver doing 100 in a 45 (by pressing down on the pedal) through a yellow light

- A driver who “didn’t see the motorcyclist” because he was looking at his PHONE, but who had the go pedal pressed down at 95-100% for as many as 10 seconds after hitting him, to the point where witnesses say the front wheels were spinning while up in the air

- Others with no detail- not the authors fault but from the ones we have, clearly there are often circumstances which would require more analysis before coming to this conclusion

Hmm. The article's source is NHTSA data that goes up through February 2025 -- pretty recent.

The article cites 5 motorcycle fatalities in this data.

Four of the five were in 2022, when Tesla FSD was still closed beta.

The remaining incident was in April 2024.

(The article also cites one additional incident in 2023 where the injury severity was "unknown", but the author speculates it may have been fatal.)

I dunno, to me this specific data suggests a technology that has improved a lot. There are far more drivers on the road using FSD today than there were in 2022, and yet fewer incidents?

Related: Well-sourced video on the topic https://youtube.com/watch?v=yRdzIs4FJJg

It's pretty impressive that we have self-driving cars that takes us this far with Just cameras. But it probably won't get any better than this without a revamp.

That said, what if we make these self driving tools fully available to drivers. Drivers are pretty good at driving already with with relatively short training. Give them the superpowers of teslas like 360 view, predictive object path, and object detection and you have super drivers.

Visual detection only doesn’t work and the man that forced Tesla to use it is now in control of government “efficiency”. This decade’s very dark humor just keeps getting worse.

This unfortunately undercuts the "ahead, alone, alive" maxim.

Tesla's Fight Club approach means they will fix the software before a VIP is killed. Five is many, but still not enough to unjustify the no-LIDAR approach. A class-action to FSD needs to happen before it comes to that.

lol the same guy that wrote this bs article https://fuelarc.com/tech/self-driving-tesla-crashes-into-wal...

You might not like Elon but that doesn’t make him wrong.

government theoretically could mandate another non-visual obstacle sensor..

It often surprises me that people think Tesla's sensor suite is sufficient for safe self driving, with quotes like "well humans rely on vision."

Human vision is nothing like the cameras on a Tesla. Our eyes have far more advanced systems including the ability to microscan, pivot, capture polarisation, and a much more sophisticated field of depth. Frankly, current generation cameras are in many ways far more primitive than human eyes. And that's not even considering the over 20% of our brain mass dedicated to post processing.

All because Musk wants to pad his profits and keep the hype without paying for a lidar.

The article gives a pretty misleading impression of where FSD stands today. It treats highway behavior as if nothing has changed, but that’s not accurate.

Before October 2024, the highway stack was still running on Tesla’s older software. A major shift happened with version 12.5.6, which brought the end-to-end neural network to highways for the first time.

Then in December, version 13.2.2 pushed things even further by scaling the model specifically for HW4/AI4. It’s a major step up from earlier versions like 12.3.x from April.

I absolutely feel for anyone who’s been involved in an accident while using FSD. But at the end of the day, the system still requires driver supervision. It’s not autonomous, and the responsibility ultimately falls on the person behind the wheel.

If you’re going to evaluate how FSD performs today, you really need to be looking at version 13 or greater. Anything older just doesn’t reflect what the system is capable of now.

I would have been skeptical of news like this in the past, but the last 6 months have shown that Elon Musk doesn't give a fuck about human tragedy. Or truth.