The Tesla car crash blame game

TL;DR: Yesterday, the US’ top auto safety regulator launched a special investigation into a Tesla crash that killed a 76-year-old woman in her Texas home last Friday. The driver blames the car’s automated driving system—Tesla says it was driver error. The incident is just the latest in a long list of safety concerns about the company’s’s self-driving tech.

What happened: There’s no confirmation yet of which driving assistance feature was being used (if one was at all), but the blue Tesla Model 3 veered into the victim’s house “at a high rate of speed,” according to local police. Tesla’s top AI exec claimed on X that the driver overrode self-driving by flooring the accelerator, reaching a speed of 73 mph—apparently info gleaned from the company’s own review of the crash data.

Elon Musk added that the driver’s claim makes “no sense” because Full Self-Driving (its most advanced tier of automated driving features, which is locked behind a subscription) “drives slowly through neighborhood streets.” So far, none of the claims on either side have been independently verified.

FSD’s recent troubles: Tesla’s recent safety record sows some doubt about Musk’s implication that FSD is too cautious to cause a high-speed crash. A demo last year from a software safety advocacy group showed a Tesla Model Y with FSD enabled repeatedly blowing past a stopped school bus (and hitting child-sized mannequins). Last week, Swedish regulators even pushed the EU to reject the rollout of FSD software because it can be configured to ignore speed limits. And Tesla’s own data labelers—who review footage to train the self-driving software—have raised serious concerns about the cars’ safety, per a Reuters report from May.

Tesla’s own numbers: The EV company, for its part, has often said that FSD is 10 times safer than human drivers. Reuters’s recent analysis, though, found that the company’s safety stats were sometimes derived from misleading comparisons—like pitting Tesla vehicles against the average car in the US, which tends to be older and doesn’t include the newest safety features that automakers now implement to reduce crashes.

Bottom line: Tesla is no stranger to federal probes into its cars’ safety. Since 2016, the National Highway Traffic Safety Association has opened over three dozen special crash investigations involving the company’s automated driving systems. —WK