[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.

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.

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.

Also, the comparison to Waymo is stated without harmonizing crash definitions and reporting practices.

[tsimionescu]

All of your arguments are expounded upon in the article itself, and their conclusions still hold, based on the publicly available data.

The 3x figure in the title is based on a comparison of the Tesla reports with estimated average human driver miles without an incident, not based on police report data. The comparison with police-report data would lead to a 9x figure instead, which the article presents but quickly dismisses.

The denominator problem is made up. Tesla Robotaxi has only been launched in one location, Austin, and only since July (well, 28th June, so maybe there is a few days discrepancy?). So the crash data and the miles data can only refer to this same period. Furthermore, if the miles driven are actually based on some additional length of time, then the picture gets even worse for Tesla, as the denominator for those 9 incidents gets smaller.

The analysis indeed doesn't distinguish between the types of accidents, but this is irrelevant. The human driver estimates for miles driven without incident also don't distinguish between the types of incidents, so the comparison is still very fair (unless you believe people intentionally tried to get the Tesla cars to crash, which makes little sense).

The comparison to Waymo is also done based on incidents reported by both companies under the same reporting requirements, to the same federal agency. The crash definitions and reporting practices are already harmonized, at least to a good extent, through this.

Overall there is no way to look at this data and draw a conclusion that is significantly different from the article: Tesla is bad at autonomous driving, and has a long way to go until it can be considered safe on public roads. We should also remember that robotaxis are not even autonomous, in fact! Each car has a human safety monitor that is ready to step in and take control of the vehicle at any time to avoid incidents - so the real incident rate, if the safety monitor weren't there, would certainly be even worse than this.

I'd also mention that 5 months of data is not that small a sample size, despite you trying to make it sound so (only 9 crashes).

[cameldrv]

Statistically 9 crashes is enough to draw reasonable inferences from. If they had the expected human rate of 3 over the period in question, the chance that they would actually get into 9 accidents is about 0.4%. And mind you, that’s with a safety driver. It would probably be much worse without one.

[brookst]

I agree with most of your points and your conclusion, but to be fair OP was asserting that human drivers under-report incidents, which I believe. Super minor bumps where the drivers get out, determine there’s barely a scratch, and go on. Or solo low speed collisions with walls in garage or trees.

I don’t think it invalidates the conclusion, but it seems like one fair point in an otherwise off-target defense.

[parineum]

> The 3x figure in the title is based on a comparison of the Tesla reports with estimated average human driver miles without an incident, not based on police report data. The comparison with police-report data would lead to a 9x figure instead, which the article presents but quickly dismisses.

I think OP's point still stands here. Who are people reporting minor incidents to that would be publicly available that isn't the police? This data had to come from somewhere and police reports is the only thing that makes sense to me.

If I bump my car into a post, I'm not telling any government office about it.

[YeGoblynQueenne]

To add to this, more data from more regions means the estimate of average human miles without an incident is more accurate, simply because it is estimated from a larger sample, so more likely to be representative.

[fragmede]

Tesla Robotaxi service is also available in the San Francisco Bay Area, with an area serviced greater than Waymo. Since at least September, 2025, but probably earlier.

[PaulRobinson]

TFA does a comparison with average (estimated), low-speed contact events that are not police-reported by humans, of one incident every 200,000 miles. I think that's high - if you're including backing into static objects in car parks and the like, you can look at workshop data and extrapolate that a lower figure might be closer to the mark.

TFA also does a comparison with other self-driving car companies, which you acknowledge, but dismiss: however, we can't harmonize crash definitions and reporting practices as you would like, because Tesla is obfuscating their data.

TFA's main point is that we can't really know what this data means because Tesla keep their data secret, but others like Waymo disclose everything they can, and are more transparent about what happened and why.

TFA is actually saying Tesla should open up their data to allow for better analysis and comparison, because at the moment their current reporting practice make them look crazy bad.

[hedora]

> TFA does a comparison with average (estimated), low-speed contact events that are not police-reported by humans, of one incident every 200,000 miles.

Where does it say that? I see "However, that figure doesn’t include non-police-reported incidents. When adding those, or rather an estimate of those, humans are closer to 200,000 miles between crashes, which is still a lot better than Tesla’s robotaxi in Austin."

All but one of the Tesla crashes obviously involved significant property damage or injuries (the remaining one is ambiguous).

So, based on the text of the article, they're assuming only 2/5ths of property damage / injury accidents are reported to the police. That's lower than I would have guessed (don't people use their car insurance, which requires the police report?), but presumably backed by data.

[philipallstar]

> TFA's main point is that we can't really know what this data means because Tesla keep their data secret

If that's so, then the article title is very poor.

[xnx]

Tesla could share real/complete data at any time. The fact that they don't is likely and indicator the data does not look good.

[LunicLynx]

You can do this with every topic. XYZ does not share this, so IT MUST BE BAD.

[sigmoid10]

I've actually started ignoring all these reports. There is so much bad faith going on in self-driving tech on all sides, it is nearly impossible to come up with clean and controlled data, much less objective opinions. At this point the only thing I'd be willing to base an opinion on is if insurers ask for higher (or lower) rates for self-driving. Because then I can be sure they have the data and did the math right to maximise their profits.

[jraby3]

The biggest indicator for me that this headline isn't accurate is that Lemonade insurance just reduced the rate for Tesla FSD by 50%. They probably have accurate data and decided that Tesla's are significantly safer than human drivers.

[4d4m]

Thank you. Everyone is hiding disengagement and settling to hide accidents. This will not be fixed or standardized without changes to the laws, which for self driving have been largely written by the handful of companies in the space. Total, complete regulatory capture.

[fabian2k]

I think it's fair to put the burden of proof here on Tesla. They should convince people that their Robotaxis are safe. If they redact the details about all incidents so that you cannot figure out who's at fault, that's on Tesla alone.

[LunicLynx]

While I think Tesla should be transparent, this article doesn't really make sure it is comparing apples to apples either.

I think its weird to characterize it as legitimate and the say "Go Tesla convince me ohterwise" as if the same audience would ever be reached by Tesla or people would care to do their due diligence.

[philipallstar]

The burden of proof is on the article writer.

[MaybiusStrip]

This has nothing to do with burden of proof, it has to do with journalistic accuracy, and this is obviously a hit piece. HN prides itself on being skeptical and then eats up "skeptic slop."

[gruez]

>I think it's fair to put the burden of proof here on Tesla.

That just sounds like a cope. The OP's claim is that the article rests on shaky evidence, and you haven't really refuted that. Instead, you just retreated from the bailey of "Tesla's Robotaxi data confirms crash rate 3x worse ..." to the motte of "the burden of proof here on Tesla".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-bailey_fallacy

More broadly I think the internet is going to be a better place if comments/articles with bad reasoning are rebuked from both sides, rather than getting a pass from one side because it's directionally correct, eg. "the evidence WMDs in Iraq is flimsy but that doesn't matter because Hussein was still a bad dictator".

[kreetx]

electrek.co has a beef with Tesla, at least in the recent years.

[cbeach]

Absolutely.

Let's examine the Elektrek editor's feed, to understand how "impartial" he is about Tesla:

https://x.com/FredLambert

[shushpanchik]

To add to that, most of the events described in the article - hitting cyclist, hit when reversing, hit stationary item on parking etc - happen during low speed city driving, but most miles for average driver are driven on highways. So, taxis, that are driven most of the time in city, would definitely get more crashes per mile than average driver. So 500,000/200,000 miles number could not be really applied to a taxi. I exect that number for taxis could be much lower.

Also, even for a non-taxi, 200,000 miles between minor hits on average seems incredibly high - that would mean that an average car in US does not hit anything in a car's lifetime. I'm not sure where that number is coming from, if that's non-reportable events.

[FireBeyond]

> 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.

Tesla's own stats don't count any accident without airbag deployment, regardless of severity (and modern airbag systems have a number of factors that play into deployment), and, for some unknown reason, they don't count fatalities in their crash statistics.

[razingeden]

Oh. Well then. May we see the details of these minor contact events so that people don’t have to come here and lie for them anymore?

How corrupt and unaccountable to the public is the city of Austin Texas, even, for allowing them to turn in incident reports like this?

[silon42]

"insurance-reported" or "damage/repair-needed" would be a better criteria for problematic events than "police-reported".

[buran77]

> The comparison isn't really like-for-like.

This is a statement of fact but based on this assumption:

> low-speed contact events that would often never show up as police-reported crashes for human drivers

Assumptions work just as well both ways. Musk and Tesla have been consistently opaque when it comes to the real numbers they base their advertising on. Given this past history of total lack of transparency and outright lies it's safe to assume that any data provided by Tesla that can't be independently verified by multiple sources is heavily skewed in Tesla's favor. Whatever safety numbers Tesla puts out you can bet your hat they're worse in reality.

[zzzeek]

oh hacker news, never change. "crashes 3x as much as human driven cars" but is that REALLY bad? who knows? pure gold

[jimmydddd]

Humans driving cars crash more than humans walking on side walks. But is humans driving cars really bad?

[touwer]

He's probably smart then

[adriand]

I would call strong opposition to Musk a democratic responsibility, not a derangement. We are talking about a guy with a fondness for the far right and throwing Nazi salutes, and whose destruction of USAID had, by November 2025, resulted in “hundreds of thousands of deaths”. [1] Those, of course, are just a couple of examples.

If strong opposition to that kind of evil makes me deranged, count me in.

1: https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/usaid-shutdown-has-led-to-hund...

[thegreatpeter]

I noticed the same thing. Not sure why you're being downvoted. The whole publican has turned sour recently.

[dzhiurgis]

This is from elektrek. You cannot believe anything you see from them regarding Tesla. Completely corrupt site.

[jraby3]

I find it interesting the Lemonade insurance just began offering a 50% discount for Tesla with FSD.

Insurance companies are known for analytics and don't survive if they use bad data. This points to your comment being correct.

[FireBeyond]

Who knows the backend deals there, everything up to and including Tesla subsidizing the premiums.

[quadrature]

Thats a completely different scenario than fully autonomous driving.

[_ea1k]

Good analysis. Just over a month ago, Electrek was posted here claiming that Teslas with humans were crashing 10x more than with humans alone.

That was based on a sample size of 9 crashes. In the month following that, they've added one more crash while also increasing the miles driven per month.

The headline could just as easily be about the dramatic decline in their crash rate! Or perhaps the data is just too small to analyze like this, and Electrek authors being their usual overly dramatic selves.

[epistasis]

That is an overly optimistic way to phrase an apparent decrease in crashes, when Tesla is not being upfront about data that at best looks like it's worse than human crash rates.

Unless one was a Tesla insider, or had a huge interest in Tesla over other people on the road, such spin would not be a normal thing to propose saying.

Media outlets, even ones devoted to EVs, should not adopt the very biased framing you propose.

[hedora]

I don't understand your claim.

Previous article: Tesla with human supervisor at wheel: 10x worse than human alone.

Current article: Tesla with remote supervisor: 3-9x worse than human alone.

Given the small sample sizes, this shows a clear trend: Tesla's autopilot stuff (or perhaps vehicle design) is causing a ton of accidents, regardless of whether it's being operated locally by customers or remotely by professionals.

I'd like to see similar studies broken down by vehicle manufacturer.

The ADAS in one of our cars is great, but occasionally beeps when it shouldn't.

The ADAS in our other car cannot be disabled and false positives every 10-20 miles. Every week or so it forces the vehicle out of lane (either left of double yellow line center, or into another car's lane).

If the data on crash rates for those two models were public, I guarantee the latter car would have been recalled by now.

[brookst]

I don’t think statistics work that way. A study of all Teslas and all humans in Austin for 5 months is valid because Electrek ran a ridiculous “study”, and this headline could “just as easily” have presented the flawed Elektrek stork as a legit baseline?

[fwip]

The 10x would be 9x if the methodology were the same. 9x->3x is going from reported accidents to inferred true accident rate, as the article points out.