Elon Musk has been very explicit in promising a robotaxi launch in Austin in June with unsupervised full self-driving (FSD). We'll give him some leeway on the timing and say this counts as a YES if it happens by the end of August.
As of April 2025, Tesla seems to be testing this with employees and with supervised FSD and doubling down on the public Austin launch.
PS: A big monkey wrench no one anticipated when we created this market is how to treat the passenger-seat safety monitors. See FAQ9 for how we're trying to handle that in a principled way. Tesla is very polarizing and I know it's "obvious" to one side that safety monitors = "supervised" and that it's equally obvious to the other side that the driver's seat being empty is what matters. I can't emphasize enough how not obvious any of this is. At least so far, speaking now in August 2025.
FAQ
1. Does it have to be a public launch?
Yes, but we won't quibble about waitlists. As long as even 10 non-handpicked members of the public have used the service by the end of August, that's a YES. Also if there's a waitlist, anyone has to be able to get on it and there has to be intent to scale up. In other words, Tesla robotaxis have to be actually becoming a thing, with summer 2025 as when it started.
If it's invite-only and Tesla is hand-picking people, that's not a public launch. If it's viral-style invites with exponential growth from the start, that's likely to be within the spirit of a public launch.
A potential litmus test is whether serious journalists and Tesla haters end up able to try the service.
UPDATE: We're deeming this to be satisfied.
2. What if there's a human backup driver in the driver's seat?
This importantly does not count. That's supervised FSD.
3. But what if the backup driver never actually intervenes?
Compare to Waymo, which goes millions of miles between [injury-causing] incidents. If there's a backup driver we're going to presume that it's because interventions are still needed, even if rarely.
4. What if it's only available for certain fixed routes?
That would resolve NO. It has to be available on unrestricted public roads [restrictions like no highways is ok] and you have to be able to choose an arbitrary destination. I.e., it has to count as a taxi service.
5. What if it's only available in a certain neighborhood?
This we'll allow. It just has to be a big enough neighborhood that it makes sense to use a taxi. Basically anything that isn't a drastic restriction of the environment.
6. What if they drop the robotaxi part but roll out unsupervised FSD to Tesla owners?
This is unlikely but if this were level 4+ autonomy where you could send your car by itself to pick up a friend, we'd call that a YES per the spirit of the question.
7. What about level 3 autonomy?
Level 3 means you don't have to actively supervise the driving (like you can read a book in the driver's seat) as long as you're available to immediately take over when the car beeps at you. This would be tantalizingly close and a very big deal but is ultimately a NO. My reason to be picky about this is that a big part of the spirit of the question is whether Tesla will catch up to Waymo, technologically if not in scale at first.
8. What about tele-operation?
The short answer is that that's not level 4 autonomy so that would resolve NO for this market. This is a common misconception about Waymo's phone-a-human feature. It's not remotely (ha) like a human with a VR headset steering and braking. If that ever happened it would count as a disengagement and have to be reported. See Waymo's blog post with examples and screencaps of the cars needing remote assistance.
To get technical about the boundary between a remote human giving guidance to the car vs remotely operating it, grep "remote assistance" in Waymo's advice letter filed with the California Public Utilities Commission last month. Excerpt:
The Waymo AV [autonomous vehicle] sometimes reaches out to Waymo Remote Assistance for additional information to contextualize its environment. The Waymo Remote Assistance team supports the Waymo AV with information and suggestions [...] Assistance is designed to be provided quickly - in a mater of seconds - to help get the Waymo AV on its way with minimal delay. For a majority of requests that the Waymo AV makes during everyday driving, the Waymo AV is able to proceed driving autonomously on its own. In very limited circumstances such as to facilitate movement of the AV out of a freeway lane onto an adjacent shoulder, if possible, our Event Response agents are able to remotely move the Waymo AV under strict parameters, including at a very low speed over a very short distance.
Tentatively, Tesla needs to meet the bar for autonomy that Waymo has set. But if there are edge cases where Tesla is close enough in spirit, we can debate that in the comments.
9. What about human safety monitors in the passenger seat?
Oh geez, it's like Elon Musk is trolling us to maximize the ambiguity of these market resolutions. Tentatively (we'll keep discussing in the comments) my verdict on this question depends on whether the human safety monitor has to be eyes-on-the-road the whole time with their finger on a kill switch or emergency brake. If so, I believe that's still level 2 autonomy. Or sub-4 in any case.
See also FAQ3 for why this matters even if a kill switch is never actually used. We need there not only to be no actual disengagements but no counterfactual disengagements. Like imagine that these robotaxis would totally mow down a kid who ran into the road. That would mean a safety monitor with an emergency brake is necessary, even if no kids happen to jump in front of any robotaxis before this market closes. Waymo, per the definition of level 4 autonomy, does not have that kind of supervised self-driving.
10. Will we ultimately trust Tesla if it reports it's genuinely level 4?
I want to avoid this since I don't think Tesla has exactly earned our trust on this. I believe the truth will come out if we wait long enough, so that's what I'll be inclined to do. If the truth seems impossible for us to ascertain, we can consider resolve-to-PROB.
11. Will we trust government certification that it's level 4?
Yes, I think this is the right standard. Elon Musk said on 2025-07-09 that Tesla was waiting on regulatory approval for robotaxis in California and expected to launch in the Bay Area "in a month or two". I'm not sure what such approval implies about autonomy level but I expect it to be evidence in favor. (And if it starts to look like Musk was bullshitting, that would be evidence against.)
12. What if it's still ambiguous on August 31?
Then we'll extend the market close. The deadline for Tesla to meet the criteria for a launch is August 31 regardless. We just may need more time to determine, in retrospect, whether it counted by then. I suspect that with enough hindsight the ambiguity will resolve. Note in particular FAQ1 which says that Tesla robotaxis have to be becoming a thing (what "a thing" is is TBD but something about ubiquity and availability) with summer 2025 as when it started. Basically, we may need to look back on summer 2025 and decide whether that was a controlled demo, done before they actually had level 4 autonomy, or whether they had it and just were scaling up slowing and cautiously at first.
13. If safety monitors are still present, say, a year later, is there any way for this to resolve YES?
No, that's well past the point of presuming that Tesla had not achieved level 4 autonomy in summer 2025.
14. What if they ditch the safety monitors after August 31st but tele-operation is still a question mark?
We'll also need transparency about tele-operation and disengagements. If that doesn't happen by June 22, 2026 (a year after the robotaxi launch) then that too is a presumed NO.
Ask more clarifying questions! I'll be super transparent about my thinking and will make sure the resolution is fair if I have a conflict of interest due to my position in this market.
[Ignore any auto-generated clarifications below this line. I'll add to the FAQ as needed.]
Update 2025-11-01 (PST) (AI summary of creator comment): The creator is [tentatively] proposing a new necessary condition for YES resolution: the graph of driver-out miles (miles without a safety driver in the driver's seat) should go roughly exponential in the year following the initial launch. If the graph is flat or going down (as it may have done in October 2025), that would be a sufficient condition for NO resolution.
Update 2025-12-10 (PST) (AI summary of creator comment): The creator has indicated that Elon Musk's November 6th, 2025 statement ("Now that we believe we have full self-driving / autonomy solved, or within a few months of having unsupervised autonomy solved... We're on the cusp of that") appears to be an admission that the cars weren't level 4 in August 2025. The creator is open to counterarguments but views this as evidence against YES resolution.
Update 2025-12-10 (PST) (AI summary of creator comment): The creator clarified that presence of safety monitors alone is not dispositive for determining if the service meets level 4 autonomy. What matters is whether the safety monitor is necessary for safety (e.g., having their finger on a kill switch).
Additionally, if Tesla doesn't remove safety monitors until deploying a markedly bigger AI model, that would be evidence the previous AI model was not level 4 autonomous.
Update 2026-01-31 (PST) (AI summary of creator comment): The creator clarified that passenger-seat emergency stop buttons should be evaluated based on their function:
If the button is a real-time "hit the brakes we're gonna crash!" intervention button, this would indicate supervision that could rule out level 4 autonomy
If the button is a "stop requested as soon as safely possible" button (where the car remains in control until safely stopped), this would not rule out level 4 autonomy
This distinction applies to both Waymo (the benchmark) and Tesla. The creator emphasized that mere presence of a safety monitor doesn't rule out level 4 - what matters is whether there is supervision with the ability to intervene in real time.
Update 2026-02-01 (PST) (AI summary of creator comment): The creator has proposed a concrete scenario for June 22, 2026 (the one-year deadline from FAQ14) that would result in NO resolution:
(a) Longer zero-intervention streaks but not to the point that unsupervised FSD is safer than humans
(b) More unsupervised robotaxi rides but not at a scale where tele-operation becomes implausible
(c) Continued lack of transparency on disengagements
(d) Creative new milestones that seem like watersheds but turn out to be closer to controlled demos
Conversely, if Tesla demonstrates a clear step change in autonomy before June 22, 2026 (such as declaring victory, opening up about disengagements, and shooting past Waymo), there would still be a debate about whether Tesla was at level 4 on August 31, 2025, but it would be more reasonable to give Tesla the benefit of the doubt on questions about tele-operation and kill switches.
Update 2026-02-02 (PST) (AI summary of creator comment): The creator has clarified terminology and concepts around supervision and disengagement:
Supervision refers to a human in the loop in real time, watching the road and able to intervene.
Real-time disengagement is when a human supervisor intervenes to control the car in some way - a gap in the car's autonomy. If the car stops on its own and asks for help or needs rescuing, those might count as other kinds of disengagement but not a real-time disengagement.
Evidence threshold: Human drivers have fatalities roughly once per 100 million miles, or non-fatal crashes every half million miles. A supervised self-driving car needs to go hundreds of thousands of miles between real-time disengagements before we have much evidence it's human-level safe.
With less than 100k robotaxi miles, seeing zero real-time disengagements would still be fairly weak evidence that the robotaxis would crash less than humans when unsupervised.
For miles with an empty driver's seat, we need to know:
If safety monitors had the ability to intervene with a passenger-side kill switch
If that kill switch was real-time (like an emergency brake) or just a request for the car to autonomously come to a stop as quickly as possible
If the robotaxis have been remotely supervised (using the definition of supervision from FAQ8)
Update 2026-02-02 (PST) (AI summary of creator comment): The creator has analyzed data suggesting Tesla robotaxis may have markedly worse safety than human drivers, even with supervision. If this analysis is fair, the creator indicates that Tesla's safety record could be too far below human-level to count as level 4 autonomy, regardless of questions about kill switches or remote supervision.
The creator notes that human-level safety has been assumed as a lower bound for level 4 autonomy throughout this market. A safety record significantly worse than human drivers would not meet the level 4 standard, even if other technical criteria were satisfied.
The creator acknowledges a possible Tesla-optimist interpretation: that Musk "jumped the gun" in summer 2025 but may have achieved unsupervised FSD later (possibly January 2026). However, this would still result in NO resolution for this market, since the criteria must be met by August 31, 2025.
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@dreev research on Robotaxi safety
https://x.com/raines1220/status/2023854888040411140
@MarkosGiannopoulos
Oct 2025 at 40k MPI and Feb 2026 at 417k and this is still below human level.
(and to make it that good looking, has removed "parking lot dents and stationary crashes")
Seems like evidence they are still improving it up towards human level?
@ChristopherRandles This was mostly shared because @dreev was trying to run the numbers on the Robotaxi incidents. However, I think it's immaterial to this market. There are already tons of human taxi drivers who are worse than the average driver :)
@MarkosGiannopoulos I'm seeing potential problems with that analysis: Are they excluding miles with a human in the driver's seat (all California rides, Austin rides that include highways, etc)? Are they overestimating the fleet size? (Robotaxitracker.com says 45 robotaxis currently.) I do like the idea of excluding parking lot bumps and incidents where the robotaxi was stationary. (I mean, it's possible for a robotaxi to, for example, run a red light and then come to a standstill in the middle of an intersection and get hit, which is to say that being stationary at the moment of impact isn't necessarily exculpating, but it's pretty good evidence.) I think this is all extremely fuzzy when trying to compare to human drivers because the reporting for human incidents is so different. But we can compare to Waymo and Zoox! That was my strategy in https://agifriday.substack.com/p/crashla and I may try
repeating it with the data filtered the way this person is doing.
@dreev From what I saw, they take the 650.000 miles chart that Tesla made public in their Q4/2025 investor note as being about Austin only. Probably because the chart says "Robotaxi miles" (Tesla does not use the term Robotaxi in California, see also the Robotaxi page https://www.tesla.com/robotaxi which makes no mention of California)
@MarkosGiannopoulos Oh! That changes things! So maybe it's only the highway trips (and other times, like for weather, when the safety monitor has gone back in the driver's seat) that are getting lumped in? Any ideas for estimating that fraction, if so?
This is brutal trying to suss out the truth. I'm scrutinizing the relevant page of Tesla's Q4 report and they seem to leave it completely ambiguous whether that 650k miles includes supervised rides. I'm working on repeating my analysis with just every possible benefit of the doubt for Tesla, despite that being extremely undeserved, just to get an upper bound on what Tesla bulls can reasonably choose to believe.
From the official Tesla Q4 report:
Testing of driverless robotaxis began in December 2025, suggesting that rides as of August 31 did not count as driverless. That's puzzling because they've been reporting incidents to NHTSA since June 2025 for which they officially report that the car had no driver/operator, remote or otherwise.
Tesla calls the California program a ride-hailing service, avoiding calling those cars robotaxis explicitly.
They show a cumulative plot of robotaxi miles, presumably because a more standard miles per month plot would look embarrassingly flat for recent months.
No indication of whether the highway rides and bad-weather rides in which the safety monitor moved back to the driver's seat are included in this mileage.
Note that robotaxitracker.com is explicitly calibrated to the 650k in the Q4 chart, so we're not really getting independent evidence there.
But robotaxi-safety-tracker.com estimates mileage based on fleet size (from robotaxitracker.com) so that's a somewhat independent check.
See https://dreeves.github.io/crashla/ for graphs and raw data.
@dreev "driverless robotaxis" = no safety person in the car. The robotaxis have been using an ADS (Automated Driving System) since day 1 (June), so everything needs to be reported to NHTSA
@MarkosGiannopoulos Hmm, I guessss. Weird to say "driverless" rather than "safety-monitor-less" or "fully unsupervised" or similar. But I guess this is just the same old question mark about how much human supervision these robotaxis have had.
@MarkosGiannopoulos The digging continues and I'm satisfied that you're correct. In the Q3 Tesla earnings call, Ashok Elluswamy said that Bay Area rideshare miles had exceeded a million by October 22, 2025. So, assuming they're not committing securities fraud, we can take this graph to be the mileage for just the Austin robotaxis:
There may still be a subset of those miles for which a human was in the driver's seat (highway rides and bad weather rides -- I wish we knew what fraction those are).
I've updated my AGI Friday posts accordingly:
https://agifriday.substack.com/p/crashla
https://agifriday.substack.com/p/crashla2
Definitely let me know if you spot more errors! And thanks so much for all the help getting to the truth on these questions.
@dreev Good catch. In general, the investors' decks and the call transcripts are a more accurate view of what Tesla is actually doing rather than whatever Musk posts on X :D
@dreev This is an interesting one. An unsupervised robotaxi enters a construction zone, and the customer calls support. The support does not seem to be doing any remote driving, though (since the car does not do the logical thing to back out of the situation). The communication from support was not clear at all about what/if anything, they did.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lHPYoiRadI
@MarkosGiannopoulos Holy cow! I'm actually at a loss to explain this. The only thing I can think of, and I realize how ridiculous I sound, is that remote assistance intentionally let the car muddle through as an experiment, or in order to make skeptics like me look stupid. Which I fear is working. Because "they must be cheating with remote supervision" suddenly seems a lot less likely.
But my confusion here is pretty profound. Waymos understand hand signals; Teslas obviously don't. Waymos are also far safer. See my most recent AGI Friday. But when Waymos end up in situations like that, which happens all the time, they do not muddle through, they get human help.
So taking what we see in that video at face value would mean Tesla is already way beyond Waymo? If so it should be a safe bet that Tesla overtakes Waymo in 2026, something I'm betting heavily against.
Another explanation is that Tesla robotaxis are doing so few miles that they can count on edge cases like this to be rare enough to just yolo it.
Or could it just be that tele-operators can't operate the car in reverse?
I'm definitely interested to hear your theories. Really good case study here. Thanks for sharing it!
@dreev
"Waymos understand hand signals; Teslas obviously don't."
I don't think this is what goes on in this case. Yes, the workers are waving the car forward, but there are two huge vehicles in front, moving in all directions. The most likely explanation is that FSD is conducting multiple risk assessments and proceeding cautiously.
Besides, there is already a lot of evidence that the customer version of FSD understands hand waves. Example https://x.com/tesla_archive/status/2022498514329309646
On Waymos stopping and asking for help more often than Robotaxi. I would guess it has to do with each company's risk profile. Tesla is in a testing period, and they need the edge cases. Waymo is less risk-averse in general, is not so much in the media spotlight and doesn't mind a few "Waymo car stuck at intersection" kind of headlines.
@MarkosGiannopoulos In this new example you've shared, I don't see any evidence that the car understands hand signals. The car does the only correct thing it could do, given a human in the lane.
For the example where the robotaxi muddles through the construction zone, going backward and forward, I agree it's plausible that it's ignoring the hand signals out of general caution. A human would've been more responsive to the hand signals, but that's weak evidence that the robotaxi doesn't understand them.
The main reason I made that claim was what happened before the video starts. As the passenger described it in the video, "we ignored the flagger guy who was saying DON'T GO THIS WAY and we went this way anyway." He characterizes it that way again at the end of the video. But I just noticed he kind of contradicts himself in the video description:
The flagger was present, but he wasn’t physically blocking the closed lane. He was way off to the right, blocking the straight path, not the road actually under construction, and gesturing in a way that wasn’t totally clear (even to me).
My suspicion is that what he says out loud in the video is genuine and that, being a huge Tesla apologist, he kinda convinced himself afterwards that the hand signals weren't clear.
Not understanding hand signals would be consistent with examples I've seen lately of Tesla FSD not understanding signs such as "no turn on red".
PS: But to be fair, it's possible I'm giving too much credit to Waymo. I don't actually know how often Waymos give up and call remote assistance when getting hand signals from flaggers.
@dreev
>So taking what we see in that video at face value would mean Tesla is already way beyond Waymo?
I think the more rational assumption, is that Waymo cares more about safety & compliance than Tesla. Waymo systems requesting help, we ought not presume to be a TECHNICAL DEFICIENCY with Waymo's system. Rather, Tesla's system & employees refusing help, is a SAFETY DEFICIENCY with Tesla.
@MarkosGiannopoulos I zoomed in as much as I could and I think the Waymo's turning radius might be tight enough that it didn't actually cross that yellow line. Regardless, kudos to the Tesla robotaxi for the quick reaction.
@dreev It was close. The Waymo car made a wide turn there for no apparent reason. I would have probably slowed down if I were driving the Tesla.
@MarkosGiannopoulos Yeah, slowing down seems correct as a human. But maybe that's mostly because the alternative -- changing lanes -- requires confirming that the lane is clear, which is slower. But as an AI you're already, in parallel, monitoring that lane. So plausibly the robotaxi did the optimal thing, is my point.
@MarkosGiannopoulos Nice, it's looking believable that the safety monitors are on track to being totally removed.
Do you have any ideas for estimating the number of Tesla robotaxi miles in Austin that have had a safety driver supervising in the driver's seat? We know that includes any rides which went on highways starting September 1st, and at least some rides when the weather was bad.
My previous comment suggested that Tesla robotaxis have too few miles accumulated for us to know they're safe, even with a perfect safety record and zero real-time disengagements. Well, good news and bad news...
In James's market on whether Tesla will surpass Waymo in 2026, @TimothyJohnson5c16 posted some analysis from Electrek claiming that Tesla robotaxis do have enough miles to make meaningful claims about their safety.
Unfortunately, their claim is that the robotaxis, even with whatever amount of supervision they have, are markedly worse than human drivers.
I thought Electrek might be too biased a source, but, well, good news and bad news there too, if we believe Wikipedia's article on Electrek. Electrek are historically huge Tesla fanboys. It's safe to say that that's changed in recent years though. The article mentions the owner divesting from Tesla in 2020. Anyway, presumably we can't assume they're just making all this up. I'm anxious to hear counterarguments. Of course Tesla continues to make this hard by being tight-lipped about all crashes and incidents.
Waymo of course is the opposite of all of this. With their 100+ million miles and pretty complete transparency about every incident, we know Waymos are way more safe than human drivers. And because Waymos are unsupervised we know they're at zero real-time disengagements over all those miles. What Waymo has is car-initiated (i.e., AI-initiated) remote assistance. Meaning if the car is confused, it autonomously stops and calls home and a human tells it what to do.
I don't know if Tesla robotaxis ever get confused like that. If they never do, I would imagine three possible explanations:
Tesla's FSD is more advanced than the Waymo Driver, as they call it
The robotaxis are doing too few miles for those edge cases to come up
The robotaxis have dedicated remote supervisors preempting car confusion
What I had not imagined until now was the explanation that Tesla robotaxis just crash a lot more than even human drivers, let alone Waymos.
I've just been assuming this whole time that human-level safety is a lower bound -- that no robotaxi operator would tolerate safety that bad. At human-level, I'd think it only a matter of time before a PR disaster big enough to destroy the whole program. Like the tragic incidents that killed Uber's and Cruise's self-driving programs. Even much less tragic incidents would be disastrous, I'd have thought.
So if this Electrek analysis is at all fair, it's quite the bombshell. We could arguably give Tesla the benefit of the doubt on both kill switches and remote supervision and still say that their safety record is too far below human-level to count as level 4 autonomy. (After all, even a 1973 Dodge Dart can be fully self-driving, unsupervised, if we don't quibble about how quickly it crashes.)
Maybe the Tesla-optimist take here is that Musk jumped the gun last summer but unsupervised FSD really is close, or was finally achieved in December or January, and if you look at the numbers starting then, they'll tell a different story. Which would still leave us at a NO for this market but leaves plenty of room for exciting trading in James's market and others. (So far I'm personally at less than 33% over there, on Tesla overtaking Waymo in 2026, and am betting accordingly.)
I went to the primary source on this and learned things:
Tesla reported 9 robotaxi incidents in the period for which NHTSA provides data (2025 Jun 16 to Dec 15)
For 4 of those, the robotaxi was going 2mph or less
Only 1 involved injuries (minor)
Here are what I believe to be the most complete characterizations of the incidents we can get from the NHTSA data:
July, daytime, an SUV's front right side contacted the robotaxi's rear right side with the robotaxi going 2mph while both cars were making a right turn in an intersection; property damage, no injuries
July, daytime, robotaxi hit a fixed object with its front right side on a normal street at 8mph; had to be towed and passenger had minor injuries, no hospitalization
July, nighttime, in a construction zone, an SUV going straight had its front right side contact the stationary robotaxi's rear right side; property damage, no injuries
September, nighttime, a robotaxi making a left turn in a parking lot at 6mph hit a fixed object with the front ride side of the car, no injuries
September, nighttime, a passenger car backing up in an intersection had its rear right side contact the right side of a robotaxi, with the robotaxi going straight at 6mph; no injuries
September, nighttime, a cyclist traveling alongside the roadway contacted the right side of a stopped robotaxi; property damage, no injuries
September, daytime, a stopped robotaxi traveling 27mph [sic!] hit an animal with the robotaxi's front left side, no injuries [presumably "stopped" is a data entry error]
October, nighttime, the front right side of an unknown entity contacted the robotaxi's right side with the robotaxi traveling 18mph under unusual roadway conditions; no injuries
November, nighttime, front right of an unknown entity contacted the rear left and rear right of a stopped robotaxi; no injuries
All the other details are redacted. I guess Tesla feel like they have a lot to hide? The law allows them to redact details by calling them "confidential business information" and they're the only company doing that, out of roughly 10 of them. Typically the details are things like this from Avride:
Our car was stopped at the intersection of [XXX] and [XXX], behind a red Ford Fusion. The Fusion suddenly reversed, struck our front bumper, and then left the scene in a hit-and-run.
I.e., explaining why it totally wasn't their fault, with only things that could conceivably be confidential, like the exact location, redacted. So I don't think Tesla deserves the benefit of the doubt here but if I try to give it anyway, here are my guesses on severity and fault:
Minor fender bender, 30% Tesla's fault (2mph)
Egregious fender bender, 100% Tesla's fault (8mph)
Fender bender, 0% Tesla's fault (0mph)
Minor fender bender, 100% Tesla's fault (6mph)
Minor fender bender, 20% Tesla's fault (6mph)
Fender bender, 10% Tesla's fault (0mph)
Sad or dead animal, 30% Tesla's fault (27mph)
Fender bender, 50% Tesla's fault (18mph)
Fender bender, 5% Tesla's fault (0mph)
Those guesses, especially the fault percents, are pulled out of my butt. Except the collisions with stationary objects, which are necessarily 100% Tesla's fault. But if we run with those guesses, that's 3.45 at-fault accidents. Over how many miles? More guessing required! I believe that for a while, all Tesla robotaxi rides had an empty driver's seat. But starting in September, Tesla added back driver's-seat safety drivers for rides involving highways. Or more than just those? We have no idea. We do know of cases of Tesla putting the safety driver back when the weather was questionable. In any case, only accidents without a safety driver in the driver's seat are included in this dataset, so we do need to subtract those miles when estimating Tesla's incident rate.
(I'm pausing here in case anyone has thoughts before I keep going and try to get to a bottom line on what we can infer about Tesla's level of safety from this data. I don't yet know how it will turn out. I can certainly imagine, if it ends up looking ok for Tesla after all, that some of us will be like, "yeah but those sneaky bastards probably aren't complying with the reporting requirements whenever they think they can get away with it". So plenty of assumptions will still be built in but I'm super curious what this data is going to tell us.)
@dreev
6 and 9 stopped robotaxis not sure why you aren't assigning 0% Tesla fault to these.
7 animal could be anywhere from 0% to 100% Tesla fault so I would probably just assign 50% rather than 30%.
Anyway my assessment seems to end up with near identical fault apportionment in total so no complaint/disagreement so far.
@ChristopherRandles My thinking is that, for example, maybe the Tesla veered in front of the cyclist and stopped. Being at 0mph at the moment of collision is good evidence of not being at fault, but not dispositive. But I agree we should treat these as mostly if not completely the other vehicle's fault. Good point about the animal too; I agree it could be anything from 0-100 so might as well call it 50%. I guess I was aiming for some kind of reasonable amount of benefit of the doubt. But there's probably no way to make that feel satisfactory so I'm now thinking that we need to just stay apples-to-apples by comparing incident rates for all these autonomous car companies without trying to estimate fault.
That should be fair because bad luck should average out and effect them all equally.
@dreev Electrek has been negative on Tesla and FSD specifically in the last few years. I've asked GPT5 to score the last 20 Electrek articles on Tesla: "Average “Tesla-fan score” across these 20 articles: ~22/100 → on this recent slice, Electrek reads decidedly non-fan / frequently adversarial toward Tesla/Musk"
The most recent 4 headlines (to get an idea)
- Feb 5, 2026: Tesla drops plans for robo-charging site for the SF robotaxis it doesn’t have
- Feb 4, 2026: Tesla’s new FSD push looks like a gross money grab: they have questions to anwser
- Feb 4, 2026: Tesla UK sales plunge 57% in January as BYD races ahead
- Feb 4, 2026: Two Tesla board members are all over the Epstein files: what happens next?
@dreev Fun fact that came out about Waymo: their remote assistance is in the Philippines https://x.com/niccruzpatane/status/2019213765506670738
@MarkosGiannopoulos 👍 📈 💯 is my reaction to that news. If there were any doubts that they might be cheating with remote assistance, this just makes that all the more unlikely, right? You're not gonna have real-time tele-operation from literally the other side of planet.
These headlines that try to cast it as "truth comes out: Waymos are tele-operated" are so infuriatingly disingenuous. (But not nearly as outrageous as all the "Waymo hits child" headlines this week. "Waymo saves child's life by nudging it to sidewalk" would be less misleading. Maybe I'll title today's AGI Friday that way, in protest.)
Anyway, it's ultimately irrelevant where the remote assistance humans are physically located, right?
@dreev Video made clear there were some in US and some in Philippines. Could that make you wonder why split it? Is it that Philippines deal with stopped vehicles with camera close to confusing objects and cars never drive at more than 5mph while needing that assistance but US staff deals with higher speed driving? TBH, I would think it is more likely that (more expensive) US operators are probably more for developing and writing up procedures to train Philippines staff rather than higher speed driving assistance.
Claimed cars were in charge of driving and remote assistance was just one of the inputs used. Doesn't sound like remote driving to me.
Yes pretty much irrelevant where Waymo staff are. Finding out whether Tesla remote assistance staff were not in US might be more interesting but I expect they are in US and so we won't find that out. If we did, my immediate suspicion would be that it is customer call centre assistance for passenger enquiries rather than it being for remote driving.
Anyway level 4 permits some circumstances to be outside the software ability to be safe so that assistance in some unclear circumstances is ok.
@ChristopherRandles One reason might be that the Philippines team does the night shift (16 hours difference from California). But given the reluctance of the Waymo executive to say if the majority of the staff is in the US or not, it might be just that they are trying to save costs. Gemini calculated Waymo might have 600-1200 employees on remote assistance, given 2500 cars and a humans/cars ratio between 1:10 to 1:20
Here's the exciting conclusion about the Electrek article claiming Tesla robotaxis are less safe than human drivers:
https://agifriday.substack.com/p/crashla
In short: no one can actually tell anything, Tesla isn't wildly different than humans, or than Zoox. All we know for sure is Waymo is much safer than the others combined and with one sensor tied behind its back.