Tesla's ‘Robotaxis' Keep Crashing—Even With Human ‘Safety Monitors' Onboard
122 comments
·November 4, 2025fabian2k
amelius
> If Tesla wants people to trust them regarding safety, this is not the way to go.
Companies have discovered that trust does not matter. People forget in one or two weeks or so. You can do very bad things and most people will still trust you in the long run. Especially if your offer is a few dollars cheaper than the competition.
The extra sad part is that this will make roads unsafer for informed people too.
chneu
Americans have 1 day memories. Once the next news cycle starts most people move on.
That + Americans insane brand loyalty.
the_arun
4 Crashes in a drive of 250k miles. How good/bad is this with human driving? I couldn't compare this with human driving. Though I found a report on fatal crashes here - https://www.iihs.org/research-areas/fatality-statistics/deta...
fabian2k
I don't think any meaningful comparison is possible here. The type of driving matters, you have to compare similar driving profiles. And in this case there are actually humans on board. So the real comparison would have to be how many accidents (with Tesla at fault) and how many safety driver interventions that otherwise would have likely resulted in an accident. And we don't have that information.
panarky
> how many accidents (with Tesla at fault)
It's not just about fault.
Waymo has a well deserved reputation for vastly reducing the frequency and severity of accidents where it is at fault.
But if you look at the data for all crashes, regardless of fault, it's clear that Waymo also reduces the frequency and severity of crashes where other drivers are at fault.
Waymo's "we got hit by someone else" crashes are substantially lower per mil, probably on the order of 50% to 70% reduction, not just the crashes it causes.
mjparrott
This really depends on the definition of a 'crash'. For example, fatal accident > insurance claim > minor incident.
If we use insurance claim as the definition then: - The average driver files an insurance claim for a car crash about once every 17.9 years [1] - The average driver drives 13,476 miles per year [2] - This means one insurance claim per 241,220 miles driven by a human driver.
1. https://www.gtslawfirm.com/what-are-the-chances-of-getting-i... 2. https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ohim/onh00/bar8.htm
atonse
Yeah this article was better – can we just change the link to that one?
It also mentioned that Tesla hasn't registered for a permit in CA, which would require disclosing a lot more (like what you're asking for). Which is telling.
kakacik
If true thats seriously bad stat. You buy a car, if you drive even modestly, in 15-20 years you will end up in 3-5 accidents on average. Much worse than me with mildly less kms (0 bad accidents, 1 light, few times avoiding them via quick reactions in complex situations that most probably no current self-drive could handle well if at all, ie hearing car crashes behind the bend and breaking in advance, or few cars behind us and moving a bit further to avoid being also hit in bowling style).
johnthuss
All while Waymo is expanding to more and more cities, including Detroit where it will deal with snow and ice. Waymo is years ahead of Tesla in the self-driving race. It's possible Tesla never succeeds in launching a truly self-driving car.
samwillis
I think is really interesting how it's often suggested Waymo is at a disadvantage over Tesla due to its reliance on LIDAR and the costs associated with it. But the reality is that it's enabled Waymo to move faster and gain significant more operational experience than Tesla, and that's far more important than front loading with cost reductions in a service business.
Tesla have been operating as a product business, and cost reduction of that product was key to scale and profitability. I completely understand why they have focused on optical sensors for autopilot, lidar was always going to be impossibly expensive for a consumer product.
Waymo on the other hand have always been aiming to build a service business and that changes the model significantly, they need to get to market and gain operational experience. Doing that with more expensive equipment to move faster is exactly what was needed. They can worry about cost of building their cars later, much later.
bbarnett
lidar was always going to be impossibly expensive for a consumer product.
Everything is expensive without scale. But lidar will be very cost effective, when scaled to millions upon millions of cars annually.
And with scale, there are reasons to optimise, reduce cost, etc. Large volumes of sales draws more research. Research to reduce cost.
Self driving is a long game. Decades.
orwin
It's already cost effective. Lidar prices have been divided by like 10 in a bit more than a decade. I've read a Wall street story about a SV company that wanted to enter the Lidar market for cars, only to bifurcate to a weird scam and a SPAC when they realized as the prices fell that Lidar would never be a very profitable.
Lidar production costs have already scaled. Now it need more miniaturization (which will help with production costs even more) and something against diffraction.
samwillis
Oh, yeh, don't get me wrong. I meant impossibly expensive to drop into a mid range car with no scaling up from a higher value lower volume product range first.
Workaccount2
The cost for Waymo is the whole car, so Waymo is in it at ~$100k per operational taxi. They are beholden to hardware manufacturers for their product.
Tesla is trying to get in at ~$20k per operational taxi, with everything made in house.
Assuming Tesla can figure out it's FSD (and convince people it's safe), they could dramatically undercut Waymo on price, while still being profitable. If a Waymo to the airport is $20, and Robotaxi is $5, Tesla will win, regardless of anything else (assuming equal safety).
xethos
This is just Google doing what they've done for years now: start with the software, partner with hardware OEMs, then build their own hardware. Android to Nexus to Pixel line is one example, Google Now on Tap to their own smart speakers is another (though they may not have hit the third step there yet), and Waymo / Google Maps to self driving is following the same path.
xnx
> due its reliance on LIDAR
Due to its choice to use LIDAR. Waymo has tested a working system using cameras only, but they choose to use LIDAR because it is safer and does not significantly change cost.
> Waymo on the other hand have always been aiming to build a service business
Waymo's roadmap (from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXLgzP3gv2k):
1) Ride hailing 2) Local delivery 3) Long haul trucking 4) Personally owned cars
Is step 4 still considered a service? It will almost certainly require a subscription.
philipallstar
> Waymo on the other hand have always been aiming to build a service business and that changes the model significantly
This isn't the main factor. The main factor is Waymo only does this one thing. Tesla has been: building electric cars and forcing all car makers to do the same; building charging networks; funding and releasing free of charge battery tech research improvements; and doing self driving, and all of it while trying to make a profit to keep running. Waymo is funded by Google, which has infinitely deep ads-spying-on-you pockets. Which is just much, much easier.
xnx
> Which is just much, much easier.
Building a self-driving car is more difficult as evidenced by no one having delivered one except for Google. Many companies (including astronomically rich ones like Apple) have tried.
jjice
The cost discussion on LIDAR always confused a layman like me. How much more expensive is it that it seemed like such a splurge? LIDAR seems to be the only thing that could make sense to me. The fact Tesla does it with only cameras (please correct me understanding if I'm wrong) never made sense to me. The benefits of LIDAR seem huge and I'd assume they'd just become more cost effective over time if the tech became more high in demand.
I'm _way_ out of my depth though.
robotresearcher
Lidar will continue to get cheaper, but it has fundamental features that limit how cheap it can get that passive vision does not.
You’re sending your own illumination energy into the environment. This has to be large enough that you can detect the small fraction of it that is reflected back at your sensor, while not being hazardous to anything it hits, notably eyeballs, but also other lidar sensors and cameras around you. To see far down the road, you have to put out quite a lot of energy.
Also, lidar data is not magic: it has its own issues and techniques to master. Since you need vision as well, you have at least two long range sensor technologies to get your head around. Plus the very real issue of how to handle their apparent disagreements.
The evidence from human drivers is that you don’t absolutely need an active illumination sensor to be as good as a human.
The decision to skip LiDAR is based on managing complexity as well as cost, both of which could reduce risk getting to market.
That’s the argument. I don’t know who is right. Waymo has fielded taxis, while Tesla is driving more but easier autonomous miles.
The acid test: I don’t use the partial autonomy in my Tesla today.
madamelic
> How much more expensive is it that it seemed like such a splurge?
LiDARs at the time Tesla decided against them were $75k per unit. Currently they are $9,300 per car with some promising innovations around solid state LiDAR which could push per-unit down to hundreds of dollars.
Tesla went consumer first so at the time, a car would've likely cost $200k+ so it makes sense why they didn't integrate it. I believe their idea was to kick off a flywheel effect on training data.
vardump
Have they already solved the issue of LIDAR destroying CMOS cameras with its laser?
seanhunter
> lidar was always going to be impossibly expensive for a consumer product.
I just don't buy this at all
>"The new iPad Pro adds ... a breakthrough LiDAR Scanner that delivers cutting-edge depth-sensing capabilities, opening up more pro workflows and supporting pro photo and video apps." [1]
Yes of course the specs of LiDAR on a car are higher but if apple are putting it on iPads I just don't buy the theory that an affordable car-spec LiDAR is totally out of the realm of the possible. One of the things istr Elon Musk saying is that one of the reasons they got rid of the LiDAR is the problem of sensor fusion - what do you do when the LiDAR says one thing and the vision says something different.
[1] https://www.apple.com/uk/newsroom/2020/03/apple-unveils-new-...
Veedrac
Tesla got rid of radar because of sensor fusion, and particularly for reasons that wouldn't apply to high resolution radar. Sensor fusion with a high resolution source like LiDAR isn't particularly tricky.
robotresearcher
The iPad lidar has a range of a handful of meters indoors and is not safety critical.
Higher specs can make all the difference. A model rocket engine vs Space Shuttle main engine, for an extreme example. Or a pistol round vs an anti-armor tank round. The cost of the former says nothing at all about the latter.
2OEH8eoCRo0
Tesla's strategy is bad. Build something that works first then optimize.
They optimized for cost first and may never get it to work.
unglaublich
Exactly, and the Waymo sensors are practically a superset of those of Tesla, so with all the acquired data, then can build models that slowly phase out the need for Lidars.
consumer451
That's an interesting take. So, classic premature optimization for scale?
testing22321
I have no doubt Waymo is ahead of Tesla right now.
Why does it then follow that Tesla will never release a truly self driving car? That makes no sense.
Is it somehow impossible for an achievement to be reached by more than one person/company?
Of course not. The hyperbole is not needed, and does nothing but remove credibility from your statement
chneu
There are serious concerns about Tesla even being around in a few years.
They have very large legal issues right now. Legal issues that are going to cost them tens of billions, depending on the legal proceedings.
xnx
> Why does it then follow that Tesla will never release a truly self driving car?
Never is a long time, but it's possible that Tesla adopts LIDAR before it gets camera-only to work.
There are all kind of historical technological dead-end examples (e.g. planes that flap their wings).
testing22321
You mean to say a company or person will change their approach, adapt and grow as they learn how to best achieve their goal?
Ummmm yes. That is the definition of doing something difficult.
LurkandComment
For a fraction of Musk's bonus he could buy Waymo
drivingmenuts
What value does he bring to Tesla? or SpaceX? Or any of his other companies, for that matter?
fluidcruft
Musk is gonna buy Alphabet? Fascinating.
Octoth0rpe
Alphabet might be willing sell off just waymo.
octocop
They are in completely different leagues, the Tesla robotaxi vehicle is probably cost 10x less, at least.
dachworker
Isn't the lesson from the success of TSLA, that you don't compete on price? That's what made Tesla the first successful EV. Because unlike the rest, they didn't try to compete on price and offer a mass market consumer vehicle. Instead they started with a roadster and then a luxury saloon both targeting the upper end of the market. I don't see the point of a budget taxi car. After all even the human driven counterparts tend to be higher end luxury saloons or SUVs.
madamelic
Robot Taxis will be competing on price. Whoever can release the lowest cost per mile and most reliable taxi will take lion's share simply because consumers are generally price conscious about transport. Very few will be analyzing the data if two are judged to be 'safe enough', it will come down to price.
Companies like BYD and Tesla are positioned well for that if they can get their AV functionality proven out as both are fully integrated car manufacturers.
Waymo doesn't have in-house manufacturing and is, to my knowledge, purely software so they have lots of vendors along with a relatively low output of vehicles. Their 2025 and 2026 plan is to build 2,500 new cars per year. Each Waymo car currently costs over $100k. Even if Tesla was pushing out Model Ys as their robotaxi platform, they could flood the market very easily in both scale and price per mile _if_ UFSD (unsupervised FSD) was proven.
LorenDB
I assume you mean "sedan" rather than "saloon"?
tverbeure
Does that include the cost of a full-time chaperone?
That aside, the cost of a Waymo is estimated to be between $150 and $200k. A model 3 based Tesla robotaxi doesn’t cost less than $20k…
Workaccount2
The reason for the cybercab is to produce an absolute bare bones self driving vehicle for $20kish.
gibolt
Cost to manufacture is likely around $25k
don_neufeld
LIDAR, like other technologies, declines in cost over time, has done so substantially, and will continue to do so.
Tesla is just on the wrong side of that bet.
4kchiefofstaff
Calculate how much a car can drive (200-400k km), then the avg cost of a car (50k vs. 100k) and the avg taxi route (5-30km).
The car itself is a price point of 10 to 40 cent pro km which has impact on the journey for sure but a lot less that it might be the reason.
if you tell me, that i can take the saver car and pay 1 euro more with a 20 euro fair, I wouldn't care.
Nonetheless, economy of scale has happened already at lidar and continues to happen.
If tesla can't get it running properly in bad weather but waymo can, they can also compensate it just by driving at situations were tesla doesn't want to drive.
But hey its just brainstorming at this point as tesla is not close enough to waymo to compare it properly. And while waymo exists, plenty of other companies exist too doing this. Nvidia itself will keep building their car platform which will level the playfield even more.
Whatever market selfdriving cars are, it will be split between everyone and no tesla will not just 'win' this. It will be a race to the bottom for everyone reducing the revenue to a commodity.
xnx
> They are in completely different leagues
Agreed. Waymo has a working self-driving vehicle that currently operates in many cities. Tesla has a buggy tech demo in a portion of Austin.
> the Tesla robotaxi vehicle is probably cost 10x less, at least.
Very unlikely. Waymo vehicles also carry twice as many people.
4b11b4
Yeah but, it doesn't work good
null
josu
This reads like a hit piece. Cars crash, that obvious. Are Robotaxis crashing above or below human-driver rates?
bluGill
I've been asking for independent analysis for years now. The data is there. Yet all the headlines are from people who have an obvious bias - this is the first where I've seen a headline where there is no evidence that the data has been looked at.
There are many ways to "lie with statistics". Comparing all drivers - including those who are driving in weather self driving cars are not allowed to see - for example. there are many others and I want some deep analysis to know how they are doing and so far I've not seen it.
xnx
> I've been asking for independent analysis for years now. The data is there
Independent analysis would be great, but Tesla has been very withholding and even deceptive with its data.
Compare to https://waymo.com/safety/impact where anyone can download the data.
Workaccount2
The biggest clue is that Tesla still needs to have a human supervisor in the car. They aren't doing that for show, it's an active admission that the tech isn't there yet.
donkyrf
The rates stated are about 10x higher than humans, and also far higher than Waymo.
kachapopopow
well we're comparing waymo to tesla here and tesla is crashing a lot? more than waymo. 4 crashes in 250k miles versus like 10 in nearly 50 million?
jmathai
From this article, Tesla crashes 50% more often. But hard to compare when one has a human safety driver and the other does not.
> the report finds that Tesla Robotaxis crash approximately once every 62,500 miles. Waymo vehicles, which have been involved in 1,267 crashes since the service went live, crash approximately every 98,600 miles. And, again, Waymo does not have human safety monitors inside its vehicles, unlike Tesla's Robotaxis.
https://mashable.com/article/tesla-robotaxis-with-human-safe...
dylan604
how is it hard to compare? the company with a safety driver has more crashes. the comparison is easily made in that it makes it even worse
bbarnett
Tesla response:
Everything is caused by human safety drivers making mistakes. It's never the AI.
IshKebab
I think you also need to consider blame and severity, rather than raw crash numbers.
orwin
Above human rates for sure. In the 90s in my country, accident rate were 5 for a million kilometer (so 5 for 621371,192 miles), and the rate have come down since.
Basically they are crashing at the same rate as 18-25 years old in the 90s, in France. When we could still drink like 3 glasses and drive.
rkomorn
You just made me think of our PSA.
Was it "un verre, ça va, deux verres, ça va, trois verres, bonjour les dégâts" ? Something like that.
Edit: looks like we didn't have "deux verres", maybe.
moduspol
And are the crashes leading to fatalities at a higher or lower rate than human drivers?
gibolt
This is the key. The known instances I've seen are very minor taps / fender benders. Not great, but not fatal accidents
JKCalhoun
Accountability is a pretty big issue, I think. We've accepted, for better or worse, a certain level of human-caused crashes for 100 years or so. If machines take the wheel they have to be an order of magnitude (or more) better.
hiddencost
Driverless Teslas are the hit pieces. Hitting people. Ayooo.
Seriously though, Tesla has an extension history of irresponsibly selling "autopilot" which killed a ton of people. Because they don't take safety seriously. Waymo hasn't.
atonse
Can you expand on a "ton" of people? Best source I've found was this wikipedia article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Tesla_Autopilot_crashe...
But I suspect it isn't comprehensive. It's hard to get good data on this for a variety of reasons.
ericpauley
> Each Tesla robotaxi currently operates with a safety monitor in the driver's seat
This is in the article right below a picture of the safety monitor in the passenger seat…
Workaccount2
The picture is likely old, Tesla had to move them to the driver seat back in september.[1]
[1]https://electrek.co/2025/09/03/tesla-moves-robotaxi-safety-m...
t1234s
Seems to be a smear article. Notice the hero video has to do with a fire at a Tesla dealer.
th0masfrancis
Looks like Waymo just killed a cat. https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/waymo-killed-cat-2113...
chneu
Cats shouldn't be outside. A human driver probably would have hit the cat, too. Heck, my neighbor in his F250 purposefully hits cats and brags about it.
BurritoKing
As a massive advocate of FSD (and someone who's currently running 14.1.4, their very latest FSD build) it is absolutely in no way ready for unsupervised FSD. It still makes silly mistakes, and the latest build is terrified of leaves and will swerve across lane dividers to desperately avoid a leaf blowing into it's path.
I love FSD, I use it for 99% of my driving, and when it's working right it's an incredibly technology that overall makes my driving safer, but there's absolutely areas of weakness that every FSD user knows it cannot be trusted in under any circumstances and you must closely supervise and be ready to take over at any time.
natch
We don’t know the details. It could be that the human drivers were in control at the time of the incidents and caused some of them. It could also be that other cars driven by humans caused them.
Web sites hosting these clickbait articles have zero incentive to make things sound less dramatic.
An obvious tell is that they’ll use the word “crash” for a Tesla bumping a parking bollard.
Workaccount2
Elon already stopped talking about the robotaxi and is now onto the Optimus bot, which should buy him at least another year or two of swindling investors.
bbarnett
It's a long term R&D project that's been going on for a decade.
HN: No one does R&D anymore. So sad.
Elon R&D: autopilot didn't work out, so everything Elon is involved in is a scam and never works.
Go ahead and dislike the guy, but nobody on the planet has his track record of success and think big.
And he's succeeded over and over and over and over again.
Frankly I don't know anyone as successful in modern times.
Note that his success does not mean I like him, or not. It is simple reality, data.
Workaccount2
No doubt, but his ability to deliver has totally faltered.
He also built himself as an ideologue, which has/will greatly impact the ability to attract and retain talent. At the end of the day, Elon is still relying on smart people to execute these projects.
Elon is looking a lot like the amazing artist who had a golden era of great works, and now is killing himself trying to fake his way back to his former self.
hermitcrab
The swindling?
api
The root of Tesla's problems here is Musk's decision to drop LIDAR.
The reasoning, I think, was that humans can drive using sight and a little bit of sound, so an AI should be able to do this too.
Humans can do this because we have a very rich well-developed world model that allows us to fill in the gaps. We don't do it perfectly but we can do it decently well.
Modern AIs, or at least the ones small enough to be run on smaller machines that are economical to put in cars, don't have a rich world model like that. They're doing stimulus response backed by a database. That's going to break down at all kinds of edge cases.
The way to compensate for this is to give the car superhuman senses like LIDAR. The car is much dumber than a person but it can perceive its environment orders of magnitude better than a person, which compensates well enough that it has a chance of driving at least as well as a person.
jacobgorm
I don't think it is only a matter of building a better world model. CCD sensors work very differently than human eyes and have problems such as over- and underexposure that preclude their use for safe driving in certain conditions. If you were to try driving a car with a VR headset fed from dual CCD sensors into a sunset as in https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2025-tesla-full-self-driv... you would get into trouble too.
ableal
> The reasoning, I think, was that humans can drive using sight and a little bit of sound, so an AI should be able to do this too.
If memory serves, a few years ago the official position, on a Karpathy presentation, was that if radar contradicted vision they would have to discard one, so they would stick to vision only.
I could never swallow that argument - seems obvious that a radar failsafe would keep you from making bad vision errors ...
Avshalom
Pretty sure the actual reasoning was that the lidar equipment was in limited supply during the initial covid year(s).
Simulacra
Didn't this happen before with a safety monitor on their phone? I seem to remember another Robo taxi company and it hit someone who was crossing the street.
madamelic
That was Cruise and it killed the entire company.
xnx
I believe they're referring to Uber here.
"Uber's self-driving operator charged over fatal crash" https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-54175359
testing22321
> But several of the Austin crashes occurred while the vehicles were moving slowly or *stationary*
Ah yes, the old “crashed while stationary bug”. Hard to fix, that one.
The Electrek article (https://electrek.co/2025/10/29/tesla-robotaxis-keep-crashing...) contains more information. It's 4 crashes in around 250,000 miles. But Tesla redacts most information in these reports unlike e.g. Waymo, so the information is limited. If Tesla wants people to trust them regarding safety, this is not the way to go.
Personally, I'd be interested in how often the safety drivers had to intervene. But I assume we'll never get that information.