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 46 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

Optical recognition is inferior and this is not surprising.

[–] slevinkelevra@sh.itjust.works 24 points 2 hours 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 4 points 41 minutes ago

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

[–] halcyoncmdr@piefed.social 4 points 47 minutes ago

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.

[–] parzival@lemmy.org 2 points 30 minutes 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

[–] paraphrand@lemmy.world 17 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago)

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…

[–] betterdeadthanreddit@lemmy.world 1 points 53 minutes ago

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

[–] user28282912@piefed.social 1 points 1 hour ago

Darwin just getting ever more creative over time.

[–] SatansMaggotyCumFart@piefed.world 11 points 3 hours ago (1 children)
[–] Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world 6 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

How often are they just bursting into flames for no reason?

[–] Brgor@lemmy.zip 10 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

4x as often as a human I'd expect

[–] NoForwadSlashS@piefed.social 4 points 2 hours ago (2 children)

I didn't realise spontaneous human combustion was still so prevalent!

[–] AmidFuror@fedia.io 2 points 2 hours ago

It happens all the time. Especially to drummers.

[–] shortwavesurfer@lemmy.zip 0 points 2 hours ago

Spontaneous human combustion only occurs if the human is also carrying a Galaxy Note 7 LOL

[–] db2@lemmy.world 4 points 2 hours ago
[–] HumanDent@lemmy.zip 0 points 1 hour ago (1 children)
[–] ilinamorato@lemmy.world 3 points 1 hour ago

I mean, people are dying. Including the people who didn't pay for it. So, kind of a bigger deal than that.