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.
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.