this post was submitted on 17 Feb 2026
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Self-driving cars are often marketed as safer than human drivers, but new data suggests that may not always be the case.

Citing data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), Electrek reports that Tesla disclosed five new crashes involving its robotaxi fleet in Austin. The new data raises concerns about how safe Tesla’s systems really are compared to the average driver.

The incidents included a collision with a fixed object at 17 miles per hour, a crash with a bus while the Tesla vehicle was stopped, a crash with a truck at four miles per hour, and two cases where Tesla vehicles backed into fixed objects at low speeds.

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[–] 73ms@sopuli.xyz 3 points 13 hours ago (2 children)

When there's two deaths total it's pretty obvious that there just isn't enough data yet to consider the fatal accident rate. Also FWIW like was said neither of those was in any way the Waymo's fault.

[–] hector@lemmy.today 1 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

That's the problem, you can't trust these companies not to use corrupt influence to blame others for their mistakes. It's you verses a billions of dollars companies with everything at stake, that owns (senior tiered leasing rights,) your politicians, both locally, in state, and federally, and by extension the regulators up and down the line.

Do you not know how things work in this country? Given their outsized power we don't want them involved in determining blame for accidents, dash cam footage or no, we've seen irrefutable evidence is no guarentee of justice, even if it's provided to you.

[–] 73ms@sopuli.xyz 1 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

Well Waymo isn't assigning blame, it's a third party assessment based on the information released about those accidents. The strongest point remains that fatal accidents are rare enough that there simply isn't enough data to claim any statistical significance for these events. The overall accident rate for which data is sufficient remains significantly lower than the US average.

[–] hector@lemmy.today 1 points 2 hours ago

They have influence with the police and regulators, and insurance companies, to avoid blame.

They are on limited routes, at lower speeds, so they won't have a higher fatality rate. If you compared human drivers for that same stretch of road it would also be zero. You can't compare human drivers on expressways during rush hour with waymo's trip between the airport and the hotels on a mapped out route that doesn't go on the expressway.

[–] ThirdConsul@lemmy.zip 1 points 6 hours ago

The "fault" means nothing to "deaths per miles" statistic though?