Tesla's long-running claim that its Full Self-Driving technology is much safer than a human driver is facing fresh scrutiny after a Reuters investigation found flaws in the math behind those talking points.
According to Electrek, several workers who helped train the system said they would not trust it to drive them.
Reuters found Tesla's oft-repeated assertion that FSD can be as much as 10 times safer than human drivers rested on an apples-to-oranges comparison.
Tesla reportedly counted crashes involving airbag deployments and compared them with federal crash data. This data included all tow-away crashes, which is a much broader category.
As part of the investigation, University of Michigan researcher Marco Benedetti compared Tesla airbag-deployment crashes with airbag-deployment crashes across all vehicles. The figure worked out to about three times farther between crashes, calling into question Tesla's claim that its technology was "10 times safer," per Electrek.
Even that number has limitations, researchers said, because Tesla's fleet is much newer than the average car on U.S. roads.
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The Reuters report drew on conversations with nine former Tesla data labelers, one former self-driving engineer, and 11 traffic-safety researchers.
Seven of the nine labelers said they wouldn't ride with FSD driving, and 10 of the 11 researchers viewed Tesla's numbers as closer to marketing than to a rigorous safety analysis.
One said he wouldn't ride in a Tesla robotaxi "if you f****** paid me."
Reuters also found that Tesla extensively mapped robotaxi operating zones before launches, including at the Warner Bros. studio lot and in Austin, Texas, undercutting Elon Musk's longstanding claim that Tesla does not need "laborious local mapping."
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Former workers described failures involving emergency vehicles, pedestrians, construction zones, freeway off-ramps, and speeding.
Tesla's own website said, "Currently enabled features require active driver supervision and do not make the vehicle autonomous."
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has four active investigations involving FSD and Autopilot, including cases involving red lights, turns into oncoming traffic, and questions about whether Tesla's 2023 Autopilot recall went far enough.
Former Tesla employees repeatedly described Tesla's system as driver assistance, not autonomy.
"Definitely, don't trust Elon on this," a former engineer who regularly reviewed Tesla crash data told Reuters.
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