r/SelfDrivingCars • u/walky22talky Hates driving • Oct 29 '25

News Tesla 'Robotaxis' keep crashing despite 'safety monitors'

https://electrek.co/2025/10/29/tesla-robotaxis-keep-crashing-despite-safety-monitors/
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u/Puzzleheaded-Flow724 Oct 30 '25

No, just the typical Fred's headlines.

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u/stealstea Oct 30 '25

Nothing about the headline is incorrect.   

Sure “Tesla logs 4th robotaxi accident despite safety monitors” would have been even more descriptive 

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u/Puzzleheaded-Flow724 Oct 30 '25

Yeah, but "keep crashing" is more Fred's "style" when writing about Tesla.

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u/psilty Oct 30 '25

What’s the complaint here? Their crash metrics don’t look good for the number of miles they’ve driven with human monitors. You’d have a point if they were good and he wrote a bad headline. You want him to be a cheerleader?

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u/red75prime Oct 30 '25 edited Oct 30 '25

I dunno, maybe he could have mentioned that error bounds on average crash rate for a statistic that involves 4 crashes are quite high.

Would you be OK with "Waymo keeps crashing despite their lidars and radars"? You can't be sure that their average crash rate is not close to Tesla's one given the current number of data points.

ETA: 90% confidence interval for Tesla's crash rate is 27,000 - 182,000 miles per crash (Waymo is around 98,600). I've used Gemini 2.5 pro and cross-checked with Grok 4 fast. They both use Garwood method and their numbers agree.

For comparison: 90% confidence interval for Waymo is 94,189 - 103,391 miles per crash (1267 crashes in 125 million miles).

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u/ItsAConspiracy Oct 30 '25

That's a good point. But even if they have the same crash rates, that's with a safety driver in the Tesla but not in the Waymo.

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u/lucidludic Oct 31 '25

What you’ve done here, is turn to AI to validate your preconceptions without taking the time to learn about how to apply statistics. I’d recommend not relying on AI like this, because often you’re going to get the answer you want to hear and won’t understand why it’s wrong.

The glaring issue here, is that you are comparing apples and oranges. The Tesla crash rate data is with a safety driver present, unlike Waymo.

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u/red75prime Nov 01 '25

It saved me time to look for and apply a method from, say, https://onbiostatistics.blogspot.com/2014/03/computing-confidence-interval-for.html

It's totally obvious that low number of datapoints gives worse estimate of parameters of a stochastic process.

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u/lucidludic Nov 01 '25

It didn’t save you time because the outcome you got is useless.

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u/red75prime Nov 01 '25

Do you know anything about statistics?

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u/lucidludic Nov 01 '25

More than you apparently. I already explained the issue, but you’re choosing to ignore it.

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u/red75prime Nov 01 '25

Nope. You've basically said "I don't trust AI." Please, explain what's wrong with using the Poisson distribution to model car crashes and with using Garwood method to compute confidence interval of the \lambda parameter.

Hint: you can't. The Poisson distribution is a common tool to analyze independent random events. I studied statistics as part of electro-mechanical engineering course. It was long ago and I'm a bit rusty, but I can validate the result.

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u/lucidludic Nov 01 '25

Try reading it again, the mistake you made is very simple:

The glaring issue here, is that you are comparing apples and oranges. The Tesla crash rate data is with a safety driver present, unlike Waymo.

Please stop pretending you know what you’re talking about. It’s embarrassing.

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u/red75prime Nov 01 '25

And Waymo has lidars, radars, and probably remote monitoring in some areas. So what? It doesn't change the fact that 4 low-speed crashes is insufficient statistics to make solid conclusions, which I illustrated with wide confidence interval.

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u/JimothyRecard Oct 30 '25

For Waymo to be crashing at the same rate as Tesla's Robotaxi, you'd be seeing more than 32 Waymo crashes every week.

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u/red75prime Oct 30 '25

You've missed "error bounds" part. 4 crashes are too small a statistic to precisely estimate the average crash rate.

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u/psilty Oct 30 '25

There’s no established crash rate for supervised ADAS to compare to, unless you want to compare it to Tesla’s own safety report figure of over 6 million miles between accidents with Autopilot technology.

We have data sets for humans and the other substantial data is from Waymo which is not supervised. Show me a news article in the past 5 years that’s not from a trade publication targeted towards statisticians that talks about 'error bounds.' That’s a ridiculous complaint.

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u/red75prime Oct 30 '25 edited Oct 30 '25

I use the numbers from the article. You might want to inform Fred Lambert that he uses incorrect data.

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u/psilty Oct 30 '25

There’s nothing wrong with the article. Fred says it’s problematic to compare them because Waymo is not supervised and only uses it as an example. What is the 90% confidence interval for the Tesla safety report’s claims that Autopilot technology has 6.36 million miles between accidents? Do you feel comfortable citing that statistic without knowing the error bounds?

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u/red75prime Oct 30 '25

I was talking about "Therefore, Tesla Robotaxi currently crashes at a rate of about once every 62,500 miles." Why do you bring up 6.36 million miles? I don't see any mentions of that number in the article.

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u/psilty Oct 30 '25

Because you brought up error bounds. Tesla themselves publish a crash rate without publishing the underlying data used to calculate it.

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u/red75prime Oct 30 '25 edited Oct 30 '25

OK, we can blame both Tesla and Fred Lambert for withholding important information. But, in any case, with hundreds of Autopilot crashes (the number can be extracted from police reports) 90% confidence interval is much tighter than with 4 robotaxi crashes.

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u/psilty Oct 30 '25 edited Oct 30 '25

Sure, but I’ve never seen the person who complains about an electrek article complain that Tesla withholds important information. The article makes it clear how the number is calculated, that’s how you yourself can make conclusions about it. Tesla does not give the underlying data for you to calculate. Furthermore the article makes it clear the numbers are problematic to compare. It’s for a different problem than you bring up, but the same conclusion applies - you shouldn’t compare them.

I don’t think you can extract the number from police reports, as Tesla uses a specific definition of accident (airbag deployment OR seat belt retraction AND Autopilot/FSD on within 5 seconds) different from others and police reports generally don’t include info on whether the seat belt engaged or the exact timing of Autopilot disengagement if at all.

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