This just isn't true, "Traffic Light and Stop Sign Control" is a feature of basic autopilot on Model 3s.
https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/2017_2023_model3/en_eu/GU...
Earlier this year they stopped selling Autopilot altogether in the US and Canada.
Too much variation to make a call on whether their version sips have been stopping under these conditions.
The article is pretty clickbait-y, acknowledging it is unknown whether or not the car was using FSD or Autopilot, and then going on to speculate it probably was FSD, and then again saying "That's not a certainty".
>Because Tesla redacted the software version, we can’t say for certain whether this was basic Autopilot or “Full Self-Driving.”
I would like to know why Tesla (or any automaker) is allowed to redact this information.
People who think the software version isn't a valid trade secret can still ask for public disclosure, and the Washington Post has done so (https://electrek.co/2025/06/05/tesla-admits-suffer-financial...). If Tesla weren't allowed to self-redact, then the NHTSA wouldn't be able to see these reports at all until the courts settle this issue.
That's an easy one, donate enough money to elected officials who would be the only ones that could prevent this from happening :)
I'm just pulling numbers out of my ass here, but if say, one person is killed by an automobile every 100m miles, if the next year the average is 0.999 per 100m miles, that's a good thing provided the trend continues. We should not step over a dime to pick up a penny.
Do we? It's a common saying that if you want to kill someone with no penalties, have them run over with a car.
Then there are examples like these all over the place. Not to mention distracted driving and DUIs don't even get your license suspended in many or most jurisdictions.
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/law-justice/teen-w...
>The Audi, which Jones had bought one month before the crash, was the third car he had totaled in a crash within 11 months. Speed was a factor in all three collisions, but police did not cite Jones in the first two crashes, prosecutors said.
This could play out a million times at the population level. If you can decrease the chances of needing justice in the first place, shouldn't that be considered?
Corporations just pay a fine and move on. I don’t want that to be the standard for road accidents and frankly outside of this techie niche no one does.
https://www.macombgov.org/node/55/news/former-warren-police-...
>According to evidence presented from law enforcement at trial, on September 30, 2024, Burke was operating his patrol vehicle at a high rate of speed without emergency lights or siren activated when it crashed with another vehicle. Burke's partner was injured in the crash, and 34-year-old Cedric Hayden Jr. and 33-year-old Dejuan Pettis were killed.
Then there was this one a couple years ago:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Jaahnavi_Kandula
https://www.theriolindanews.com/2025/04/22/529861/license-to...
https://calmatters.org/investigation/2025/04/license-to-kill...
American drivers kill ~100 people every day behind the wheel of a car. If autonomy were 50% safer and was deployed at such scale that it replaced 50% of all hours driven it would save 25 lives every day. It would also kill 25 people every day.
Sadly, many people will clutch their pearls at inevitable headlines like Bloodthirsty Elon Sacrifices 25 Innocents on the Altar of Profit Every Day! and, their emotions sufficiently primed, they will happily pull the plug on autonomy, sending 25 people per day to their deaths and feeling great about themselves as they do it.
Let's say Tesla kill 50% less than a human driver, I'd agree to give Tesla's board 50% of the sentence for each person autopilot kills. As an incentive to make the cars kill less.
You cannot have a car that will EVER need you to intervene or else it does not work because of awful human nature. The amount of tesla uber drivers ive had literally browsing tiktok, watching youtube UNTIL the car beeps that it is a green light detected, then they immediately hit the accelerator before looking up is ridiculous. You cannot have a half ass "autopilot" driving experience where you are expected to zone out and then be expected to take control within a millisecond during uncertainty. It does not help that FSD, AP, aAP, bAP, the model, whether the car is visual only all apply differently
For example, you'll have a pretty good idea how our fellow humans will react to rumble-strips if I describe them or play a recording. I don't need to consult a datasheet or design an AI test suite with a zillion simulations and a bunch of closed-course tests.
Because most of us don’t have that problem, and insurance stats suggest we’re a hell of a lot safer drivers than a hypothetical aggregate including stolen car joyrides by teens and 50 year old teetotalers in a well maintained, modern car.
> Subject vehicle (Tesla) pre-crash speed: 4 mph
That would track with the injuries in the Tesla as well.
Gotta come up with the energy somehow. If the Tesla doesn't have it the other car needs to.
I'm sure you've seen video of the police performing a PIT maneuver. That's basically what happened to me--tapped by a car starting from a stop sign. They got a scrape, I got totaled. And, yes, it works as advertised--totally confusing, my foot somehow found the brake but I have no recall of doing so.
As a human driver with declining capabilities who will need level 4 autopilot before long to stay independent, I'm rooting for FSD.
I don't understand this part. My understanding is the basic Autopilot is very similar to the what on other cars would be adaptive cruise control plus lane finding/lane keeping.
If so, isn't the expected behavior that if you do not manually intervene at stop lights and stop signs it will remain engaged and drive right on through?
"most likely running FSD" so was it running FSD or are we speculating?
In California the charge can be anything from vehicular manslaughter to second degree murder, that means 15 years-to-life without parole, depending on other factors such prior(murder) convictions or if the victim is a peace officer and so forth.
In comparison self-driving systems do not have any punishment mechanism in the penal code. There is not even a well established liability standard, or ban/suspension threshold or any regulatory body equipped to audit a self driving system specifically [2]
[1] if found guilty - we may disagree on the mechanisms, effectiveness ,conviction rate and other details, nonetheless there is enforcement and there are going people in prison for this type of crime everyday.
[2] yes NTSB can do investigations but only for accidents (and give recommendations) and also has just 400 employees and $150M budget to cover everything from aviation to marine or pipeline and rail accidents.
Maybe this might be valid if this was a realistic thing and every bad driver who pulls out of a side street and kills someone suffers serious consequences, but they don't and it's not.
First lets have those laws and regulations for AI and we can THEN talk about conviction rates for humans(or agents) and effectiveness of enforcement.
Right now human and agents are in two different leagues of enforcement civil and criminal, so they cannot be compared and agents should be held to much higher standard than humans until that changes.
[1]Whether we like it or not individual freedom reflects in everything from gun safety(unique in the developed world) to the state of public transport in the richest country in the world.
Whataboutism is “how dare you complain about our gulags when you treat your black people like slaves.” It is not “our system kills people but it kills fewer people than what we currently have.” Especially when killing people is a result of being on the bleeding edge of what’s possible rather than being a deliberate choice to hurt people.
I believe what you're trying to talk about are excess deaths when a technology is less capable than the incumbent? I'm not sure the stats, but I'd suspect FSD is already superior to the often distracted, sometimes drunk, phone in hand driver that is the norm today.
If chatgpt is to be trusted, Waymo and Tesla FSD are already massively safer than human drivers.
Only if you intentionally drive recklessly, for example speeding and racing, is it easy to charge a driver for manslaughter.
Now on the issue itself: Why doesn't Tesla report the version and whether it was FSD or Autopilot?
The redactions have the note:
“[REDACTED, MAY CONTAIN CONFIDENTIAL BUSINESS INFORMATION]”
So any company has the option to redact information if they feel like it. Tesla has chosen to provide as little information as possible, claiming business secrecy, and no one can compel them otherwise.
A normal firm would have a heads up warning when requests for comment hit their media inboxes and internally could start collecting data and developing a response: thanks to Elon they don't. The story hits first and goes completely unchallenged until investigators get involved.
Regardless of what you think of Tesla or Musk, they repeatedly kick own goals on basic product brand management.
2016 - Self-Driving Tesla Was Involved in Fatal Crash, U.S. Says - https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/01/business/self-driving-tes...
2016 - Tesla working on Autopilot radar changes after crash - https://www.freep.com/story/money/cars/2016/07/16/tesla-auto...
2017 - NTSB Issues Final Report and Comments on Fatal Tesla Autopilot Crash - https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a15339472/a-tesla-crash-bu...
2019 - Tesla didn’t fix an Autopilot problem for three years, and now another person is dead - https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/17/18629214/tesla-autopilot-...
2021 - Inside Tesla as Elon Musk Pushed an Unflinching Vision for Self-Driving Cars - https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/06/technology/tesla-autopilo...
2021 - Tesla announces transition to ‘Tesla Vision’ without radar, warns of limitations at first - https://electrek.co/2021/05/25/tesla-vision-without-radar-wa...
2022 - Former Head Of Tesla AI Explains Why They’ve Removed Sensors; Others Differ - https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradtempleton/2022/10/31/former...
2022 - Tesla Dropping Radar Was a Mistake, Here is Why - https://www.idtechex.com/en/research-article/tesla-dropping-...
2023 - Tesla reportedly saw an uptick in crashes and mistakes after Elon Musk removed radar from its cars - https://archive.is/mL7zy
2023 - Elon Musk Overruled Tesla Engineers Who Said Removing Radar Would Be Problematic: Report - https://insideevs.com/news/658439/elon-musk-overruled-tesla-...
2023 - How Elon Musk knocked Tesla’s ‘Full Self-Driving’ off course - https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/03/19/elon-mu...
2023 - The final 11 seconds of a fatal Tesla Autopilot crash - https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2023/t...
I teach Tesla FSD as a cautionary tale of malicious business practices, how to deploy robots in the least safe way possible, and an anti-example of how to be a good engineer. It should be a crime to have as little a grasp on engineering and to have as much input as Musk does.
Exactly, that's precisely the wrong way to do ethical, responsible engineering. It's one thing to put your own life in the hands of a beta test, but it's another to put all of our lives at risk without our consent.
On the other hand, the public generally is not aware that these FSD machines are operating without critical safety equipment, and if they knew and were properly informed I'm not sure they would agree to be part of the test. I think Elon Musk knows that as well which is why he hasn't bothered to ask.
Moreover, I'm shocked and horrified by the number of people going around "beta testing" new versions of FSD. You'll see someone go to an area where a previous FSD version is known to fail just to see if the new one works. How is that a good idea at all? The last time you were here the car lurched into oncoming traffic unexpectedly and went down a one way, so let's see if it does it again, fingers crossed?
Utter recklessness, far worse than a 16 year old.
None of that is done for FSD or tesla cars. People don't know how they work, what the dangers are, what their failure modes are, how to approach them, and no one is telling them!
But as far as "consent" is concerned, if you wish to use the public roads, consent necessarily means accepting the roads as a commons. This means, at minimum, accepting the presence of anything the relevant government authority deems legal.
> This means, at minimum, accepting the presence of anything the relevant government authority deems legal.
All that means if you have enough money you can put whatever death machines on the road you want. I don't think that's a good way to manage a road network, and will not ultimately lead to greater safety for all.
100% Claude
It is silly that we hold self driving cars to an astronomically higher standard. We all know they are safer than human drivers. And that is true even if they kill 50 people a day.
Personally I think that fully autonomous vehicles need to be at minimum 100x safer than humans in order to maintain a social license to operate. I’m not saying the law needs to codify that. I’m saying that society could never accept a system which was merely 10x safer than humans. Imagine every vehicle in North America was replaced with a robotaxi and road deaths absolutely plummeted from 40,000 to just 1,000 per year. That’s still an article every day about “Elon Musk's river of blood”.
Supervised systems do not need such extreme safety, because the human driver remains responsible. But here’s an idea: if you want to use supervised FSD, that’s fine, but every collision gets automatically uploaded to a repository that is searchable by law enforcement and insurance companies.
https://www.gulfcoastnewsnow.com/article/12-year-old-dead-af...
We regularly hold drivers responsible for minor infractions that are otherwise consequence free.