Nothing to see here, just Tesla failing again, ten years after it announced driverless had been completely solved at the national level.

By Tesla’s own benchmark, its “Robotaxi” fleet is crashing nearly 4 times more often than what the company says is normal for a regular human driver in a minor collision, and virtually every single one of these miles was driven with a trained safety monitor in the vehicle who could intervene at any moment, which means they likely prevented more crashes that Tesla’s system wouldn’t have avoided.

Using NHTSA’s broader police-reported crash average of roughly one per 500,000 miles, the picture is even worse, Tesla’s fleet is crashing at approximately 8 times the human rate.

When I wrote in 2023 for The Atlantic, about these deadly robots, my co-author and the editors fought me hard to remove my statements about Tesla. I never gave up, instead pushing more and more proof into their disbelieving eyes, as you can see in the final text:

Since the first-known death resulting from the feature in January 2016, Tesla’s Autopilot has been implicated in more than 40 deaths according to official report estimates. Malfunctioning Teslas on Autopilot have deviated from their advertised capabilities by misreading road markings, suddenly veering into other cars or trees, crashing into well-marked service vehicles, or ignoring red lights, stop signs, and crosswalks. We’re concerned that AI-controlled robots already are moving beyond accidental killing in the name of efficiency and “deciding” to kill someone in order to achieve opaque and remotely controlled objectives.

It just goes to show how warnings were being actively suppressed, without any coherent reason why. “Where’s your proof of danger” was their line, as if dozens dead didn’t exist. Proving Tesla is a total failure is trivial. Convincing people Tesla is a failure continues to be a challenge. I sat in a cafe the other day and listened to a Tesla owner excited to invest in SpaceX because he believed his Tesla was magic.