TL;DR: Self-Driving Teslas Rear-End Motorcyclists, Killing at Least 5
Brevity is the spirit of wit, and I am just not that witty. This is a long article, here is the gist of it:
- The NHTSA’s self-driving crash data reveals that Tesla’s self-driving technology is, by far, the most dangerous for motorcyclists, with five fatal crashes that we know of.
- This issue is unique to Tesla. Other self-driving manufacturers have logged zero motorcycle fatalities with the NHTSA in the same time frame.
- The crashes are overwhelmingly Teslas rear-ending motorcyclists.
Read our full analysis as we go case-by-case and connect the heavily redacted government data to news reports and police documents.
Oh, and read our thoughts about what this means for the robotaxi launch that is slated for Austin in less than 60 days.
Fair enough!
At least one of the fatalities is Full-Self Driving (it was cited by name in the police reports). The remainder are Autopilot. So, both systems kill motorcyclists. Tesla requests this data redacted from their NHTSA reporting, which specifically makes it difficult for consumers to measure which system is safer or if incremental safety improvements are actually being made.
You’re placing a lot if faith that the incremental updates are improvements without equivalent regressions. That data is specifically being concealed from you, and I think you should probably ask why. If there was good news behind those redactions, they wouldn’t be redactions.
I didn’t publish the software version data point because I agree with AA5B, it doesn’t matter. I honestly don’t care how it works. I care that it works well enough to safely cohabit the road with my manual transmission cromagnon self.
I’m not a “Tesla reporter,” I’m not trying to cover the incremental changes in their software versions. Plenty of Tesla fans doing that already. It only has my attention at all because it’s killing vulnerable road users, and for that analysis we don’t actually need to know which self-driving system version is killing people, just the make of car it is installed on.
I’d say it’s a pretty important distinction to know if one or both systems have a problem and the level of how bad that problem is.
Also are you referencing the one in Seattle in 2024 for FSD? The CNBC article says FSD, but the driver said AP.
And especially back then, there’s also an important distinction of how they work.
FSD on highways wasn’t released until November 2024, and even then not everyone got it right away. So even if FSD was enabled, the crash may have been under AP.Edit: Also if it was FSD for real
(that 2024 crash would have had to happen on city streets, not a highway)then thats 1 motorcycle fatality in 3.6 billion miles. The other 4 happened over 10 billion miles. Is that not an improvement? (edit again: I should say we can’t tell it’s an improvement yet as we’d have to pass 5 billion, so the jury is still out I guess IF that crash was really on FSD)Edit: I will cede though that as a motorcyclist, you can’t know what the Tesla is using, so you’d have to assume the worst.
Edit: Just correcting myself that I was wrong about FSD in 2024. The change over to neural nets happened in November, but FSD was still FSD on highways when this accident happened. It was even earlier than that when FSD became AP when you transitioned to higways
Police report for 2024 case attached, it is also linked in the original article: https://www.opb.org/article/2025/01/15/tesla-may-face-less-accountability-for-crashes-under-trump/
It was Full Self Driving, according to the police. They know because they downloaded the data off the vehicle’s computer. The motorcyclist was killed on a freeway merge ramp.
All the rest is beyond my brief. Thought you might like the data to chew on, though.
I’d say that means it’s a very good chance that yes, while FSD was enabled, the crash happened under the older AP mode of driving, as it wasn’t until November 2024 that it was moved over to the new FSD neural net driving code.. I was wrong here, it actually was FSD then, it just wasn’t end to end neural nets then like it is now.Also yikes… the report says the AEB kicked in, and the driver overrode it by pressing on the accelerator!
No shit on that yikes. That blew my fucking mind.
Half the time when your AEB activates, you are unconscious or dazed and you’re just flailing around your cabin like a rag doll, because you’ve crashed. If your foot happens to flail into the accelerator, get ready for a very exciting (if short-lived) application of that impressive 0 to 60 time.
Okay, so I’m going to edit my earlier replies but replying again so you see, as I was wrong.
Version 11/12 in 2023/2024 wasn’t using the AP code, it just wasn’t using the neural nets. So it was legitimately FSD, but it was running different code on the freeways (non neural net) vs on city streets (neural net)
But it was indeed FSD. Version 11.x was the change where it stopped using AP when you left city streets.