this post was submitted on 02 Apr 2025
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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.

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[–] captainastronaut@seattlelunarsociety.org 144 points 1 week ago (33 children)

Tesla self driving is never going to work well enough without sensors - cameras are not enough. It’s fundamentally dangerous and should not be driving unsupervised (or maybe at all).

[–] KayLeadfoot@fedia.io 87 points 1 week ago (18 children)

Accurate.

Each fatality I found where a Tesla kills a motorcyclist is a cascade of 3 failures.

  1. The car's cameras don't detect the biker, or it just doesn't stop for some reason.
  2. The driver isn't paying attention to detect the system failure.
  3. The Tesla's driver alertness tech fails to detect that the driver isn't paying attention.

Taking out the driver will make this already-unacceptably-lethal system even more lethal.

[–] br3d@lemmy.world 9 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

There's at least two steps before those three:

-1. Society has been built around the needs of the auto industry, locking people into car dependency

  1. A legal system exists in which the people who build, sell and drive cars are not meaningfully liable when the car hurts somebody
[–] grue@lemmy.world 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)
  1. A legal system exists in which the people who build, sell and drive cars are not meaningfully liable when the car hurts somebody

That's a good thing, because the alternative would be flipping the notion of property rights on its head. Making the owner not responsible for his property would be used to justify stripping him of his right to modify it.

You're absolutely right about point -1 though.

[–] explodicle@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

build, sell and drive

You two don't seem to strongly disagree. The driver is liable but should then sue the builder/seller for "self driving" fraud.

[–] grue@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Maybe, if that two-step determination of liability is really what the parent commenter had in mind.

I'm not so sure he'd agree with my proposed way of resolving the dispute over liability, which would be to legally require that all self-driving systems (and software running on the car in general) be forced to be Free Software and put it squarely and completely within the control of the vehicle owner.

[–] explodicle@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I would assume everyone here would agree with that 😘

[–] grue@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I mean, maybe, but previously when I've said that it's typically gone over like a lead balloon. Even in tech forums, a lot of people have drunk the kool-aid that it's somehow suddenly too dangerous to allow owners to control their property just because software is involved.

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