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.
Regular FSD rate has the driver (you) monitoring the car so there will be less accidents IF you properly stay attentive as you’re supposed to be.
The FSD rides with a saftey monitor (passenger seat) had a button to stop the ride.
The driverless and no monitor cars have nothing.
So you get more accidents as you remove that supervision.
Edit: this would be on the same software versions… it will obviously get better to some extent, so comparing old versions to new versions really only tells us its getting better or worse in relation to the past rates, but in all 3 scenarios there should still be different rates of accidents on the same software.
The unsupervised cars are very unlikely to be involved in these crashes yet because according to Robotaxi tracker there was only a single one of those operational and only for the final week of January.
As you suggest there’s a difference in how much the monitor can really do about FSD misbehaving compared to a driver in the driver’s seat though. On the other hand they’re still forced to have the monitor behind the wheel in California so you wouldn’t expect a difference in accident rate based on that there, would be interesting to compare.