TL;DR: Self-Driving Teslas Rear-End Motorcyclists, Killing at Least 5
Brevity is the spirit of wit, and I am just not that witty. This is a long article, here is the gist of it:
- The NHTSA’s self-driving crash data reveals that Tesla’s self-driving technology is, by far, the most dangerous for motorcyclists, with five fatal crashes that we know of.
- This issue is unique to Tesla. Other self-driving manufacturers have logged zero motorcycle fatalities with the NHTSA in the same time frame.
- The crashes are overwhelmingly Teslas rear-ending motorcyclists.
Read our full analysis as we go case-by-case and connect the heavily redacted government data to news reports and police documents.
Oh, and read our thoughts about what this means for the robotaxi launch that is slated for Austin in less than 60 days.
It’s because the system has to rely on visual cues, since Tesla’s have no radar. The system looks at the tail light when it’s dark to gauge the distance from the vehicle. And since some bikes have a double light the system thinks it’s a car in front of them that is far away, when in reality it’s a bike up close. Also remember the ai is trained on human driving behavior which Tesla records from their customers. And we all know how well the average human drives around two wheeled vehicles.
You mean they are providing organ donations more than any other car. Silver lining. /s
Cuz other self driving cars use LIDAR so it’s basically impossible for them to not realise that a bike is there.
What bike is that in the photo?
My partner and I were actually debating that exact question before I posted it!
It’s just stock art, but of a rider in the Midwest. Custom exhaust, custom saddle and rack for that cafe racer look, and I just barely can’t make out the model on the engine fairing.
Here it is all big, let me know if you can figure it out: https://unsplash.com/photos/a-person-riding-a-motorcycle-on-a-city-street-kPfwWyUWubA
Looks hot, that’s why I picked it.
I wonder if a state court judge could mandate its use as unsafe?
They are illegal in every developed country.
But muh innovation! How are genius CEOs supposed to innovate if they can’t use the public at large as guinea pigs??
the cybertruck is sharp enough to cut a deer in half, surely a biker is just as vulnerable.
I wonder if it’s happened yet
There was an article where he sliced a deer in half
Unless it’s a higher rate than human drivers per mile or hours driven I do not care. Article doesn’t have those stats so it’s clickbait as far as I’m concerned
Cybertrucks have 17 times the mortality rate of the ford pinto.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/02/report-cybertruck-safety-ford-pinto/
I wrote the original analysis Mother Jones is citing there. Hah, how about that! Delights me to see it cited in the wild.
Completely irrelevant to whether or not FSD is safer than human drivers.
Same goes for the other vehicles. They didn’t even try to cover miles driven and it’s quite likely Tesla has far more miles of self-driving than anyone else.
I’d even go so far as to speculate the zero accidents of other self-driving vehicles could just be zero information because we don’t have enough information to call it zero
No, the zero accidents for other self-driving vehicles is actually zero :) You may have heard of this little boutique automotive manufacturer, Ford Motor Company. They’re one of the primary competitors, and they are far above the mileage where you would expect a fatal accident if they were as safe as a human.
Ford has reported self-driving crashes (many of them!). Just no fatal crashes involving motorcycles, because I guess they don’t fucking suck at making self-driving software.
I linked the data, it’s all public governmental data, and only the Tesla crashes are heavily redacted. You could… IDK… read it, and then share your opinion about it?
And how did it compare self-driving time or miles? Because on the surface if Tesla is responsible for 5 such accidents and Ford zero, but Tesla has significantly more than five times the self-driving time or miles, then we just don’t have data yet …… and I see an announcement that Ford expects full self driving in 2026, so it can’t have been used much yet
Thanks, 'Satan.
Do you know the number of miles driven by Tesla’s self-driving tech? Because I don’t, Tesla won’t say, they’re a remarkably non-transparent company where their tech is concerned. Near as I can tell, nobody does (other than folks locked up tight with NDAs). If the ratio of accidents-per-mile-driven looked good, you know as a flat fact that Elon would be Tweeting all about it.
Sorry you didn’t find the death of 5 Americans newsworthy. I’ll try harder for the next one.
The fact that the other self driving brands logged zero motorcyclist fatalities means the technology exists to prevent more deaths. Tesla has chosen to allow more people to die in order to reduce cost. The families of those five dead motorcyclists certainly care.
This is another reason I’ll never drive a motorcycle. Fuck that shit.
As someone who likes the open sky feeling, this is why I drive a convertible instead.
It’s like smoking: if you haven’t started, don’t XD
As a fellow meat crayon I agree
Negative. I’m a meat popsicle.
Corbin?
I remember finding a motorcycle community on reddit that called themselves “squids” or “squiddies” or something like that.
Their whole thing was putting road tyres on dirtbikes and riding urban environments like they were offroad obstacles. You know, ramping things, except on concrete.
They loved to talk about how dumb & short-lived they were. I couldn’t ever find that group again, so maybe I misremembered the “squid” name, but I wanted to find them again, not to ever try it - fuck that - but because the bikes looked super cool. I just have a thing for gender-bent vehicles.
Calamari Racing Team. It’s mostly a counter-movement to r/Motorcycles, where most of the posters are seen as anti-fun. Their whole thing is that, not just a specific way to ride, they also have a legendary commenter that pays money for pics in full leather.
Bahaha, that one is new to me.
Back when I worked on an ambulance, we called the no helmet guys organ donors.This comment was brought to you by PTSD, and has been redacted in a rare moment of sobriety.
I also rammed 10cc spikes at the back of the bus, the world needs organ donors and motorcycles provide a great service for that. Hope your EMT career was short lived but rewarding.
My EMT career was both short lived and rewarding, right back at ya :)
For what it’s worth, it really isn’t clear if this is FSD or AP based on the constant mention of self driving even when it’s older collisions when it would definitely been AP, and is even listed as AP if you click on the links to the crash.
So these may all be AP, or one or two might be FSD, it’s unclear.
Every Tesla has AP as well, so the likelihood of that being the case is higher.
In this case, does it matter? Both are supposed to follow a vehicle at a safe distance
I’d be more interested in how it changes over time, as new software is pushed. While it’s important that know it had problems judging distance to a motorcycle, it’s more important to know whether it still does
In this case, does it matter? Both are supposed to follow a vehicle at a safe distance
I think it does matter, while both are supposed to follow at safe distances, the FSD stack is doing it in a completely different way. They haven’t really been making any major updates to AP for many years now, all focus has been on FSD. I think the only real changes it’s had for quite awhile have been around making sure people are paying attention better.
AP is looking at the world frame by frame, each individual camera on it’s own, while FSD is taking the input of all cameras, turning into 3d vector space, and then driving based off that. Doing that on city streets and highways is only a pretty recent development. Updates for doing it this way on highway and streets only went out to all cars with FSD in the past few months. For a long time it was on city streets only.
I’d be more interested in how it changes over time, as new software is pushed.
I think that’s why it’s important to make a real distinction between AP and FSD today (and specifically which FSD versions)
They’re wholly different systems, one that gets older every day, and one that keeps getting better every few months. Making an article like this that groups them together over the span of years muddies the water on what / if any progress has been made.
Fair enough!
At least one of the fatalities is Full-Self Driving (it was cited by name in the police reports). The remainder are Autopilot. So, both systems kill motorcyclists. Tesla requests this data redacted from their NHTSA reporting, which specifically makes it difficult for consumers to measure which system is safer or if incremental safety improvements are actually being made.
You’re placing a lot if faith that the incremental updates are improvements without equivalent regressions. That data is specifically being concealed from you, and I think you should probably ask why. If there was good news behind those redactions, they wouldn’t be redactions.
I didn’t publish the software version data point because I agree with AA5B, it doesn’t matter. I honestly don’t care how it works. I care that it works well enough to safely cohabit the road with my manual transmission cromagnon self.
I’m not a “Tesla reporter,” I’m not trying to cover the incremental changes in their software versions. Plenty of Tesla fans doing that already. It only has my attention at all because it’s killing vulnerable road users, and for that analysis we don’t actually need to know which self-driving system version is killing people, just the make of car it is installed on.
I’d say it’s a pretty important distinction to know if one or both systems have a problem and the level of how bad that problem is.
Also are you referencing the one in Seattle in 2024 for FSD? The CNBC article says FSD, but the driver said AP.
And especially back then, there’s also an important distinction of how they work.
FSD on highways wasn’t released until November 2024, and even then not everyone got it right away. So even if FSD was enabled, the crash may have been under AP.
Edit: Also if it was FSD for real (that 2024 crash would have had to happen on city streets, not a highway) then thats 1 motorcycle fatality in 3.6 billion miles. The other 4 happened over 10 billion miles. Is that not an improvement? (edit again: I should say we can’t tell it’s an improvement yet as we’d have to pass 5 billion, so the jury is still out I guess IF that crash was really on FSD)
Edit: I will cede though that as a motorcyclist, you can’t know what the Tesla is using, so you’d have to assume the worst.
Police report for 2024 case attached, it is also linked in the original article: https://www.opb.org/article/2025/01/15/tesla-may-face-less-accountability-for-crashes-under-trump/
It was Full Self Driving, according to the police. They know because they downloaded the data off the vehicle’s computer. The motorcyclist was killed on a freeway merge ramp.
All the rest is beyond my brief. Thought you might like the data to chew on, though.
That’s not good though, right? “We have the technology to save lives, it works on all of our cars, and we have the ability to push it to every car in the fleet. But these people haven’t paid extra for it, so…”
Well, only 1 or 2 of those were in a time frame where I’d consider FSD superior to AP, it’s a more recent development where that’s likely the case.
But to your point, at some point I expect Tesla to use the FSD software for AP for the exact reasons you mentioned. My guess is they’d just do something like disable making left/right turns , so you wouldn’t be able to use it outside of straight stretches like AP today.
Makes sense, statistically smaller sample to be trained on, relatively easy fix, just retrain with more motorcycles in the data.
Remember, you have the right to self-defence, against both rogue robots and rogue humans.
How you plan to self defend against a vehicle?
If it’s a Tesla truck, I guess I could splash it with half a Dixie cup full of water…
1000 fake internet point to you sir.
Propane cylinder. Mutually assured destruction.
It will do nothing. By the time a propane cylinder would rupture, even if we assume it actually ignites too, it would add very little to a massive crash that killed everyone and desintegrated everything.
Claymore and trip wire?
The new “Start Seeing Motorcycles” merch just dropped!
Don’t stop… I’m almost there
Noice.
I imagine bicyclists must be effected as well if they’re on the road (as we should be, technically). As somebody who has already been literally inches away from being rear-ended, this makes me never want to bike in the US again.
Time to go to Netherlands.
this makes me never want to bike in the US again.
I live close enough to work for it to be a very reasonable biking distance. But there is no safe route. A high-speed “stroad” with a narrow little bike lane. It would only be a matter of time before some asshole with their face in their phone drifts into me.
I am deeply resentful of our automobile-centric infrastructure in the U.S. It’s bad for the environment, bad for our wallets, bad for our waistlines, and bad for physical safety.
human driving cars still target bicyclists on purpose so i don’t know see how teslas could be any worse…
p.s. painting a couple lines on the side of the road does not make a safe bike lane… they need a physical barrier separating the road from them… like how curbs separate the road from sidewalks…
*affected
Affectively, does it realy mater if someone has slite misstakes in there righting?
I think i had a stroke reading that. Take your upvote and get out!
I’m not going to lie, I almost had a stroke writing it…
I upvoted every comment in this sub-thread shitshow and hated all of it.
Yer welcome!
Thank you for your service.
Self driving vehicles should be against the law.
Shouldn’t be an issue if drivers used it as a more advanced cruise control. Unless there is catastrophic mechanical or override failure, these things will always be the driver’s fault.
teslas aren’t even worthy of the designation “self-driving”. They use cheap cameras instead of LIDAR. It should be illegal to call such junk “self-driving”.
Why? Crash rates for Self-Driving Cars (when adjusted for crash severity) are lower.
Removing sensors to save costs on self driving vehicles should be illegal
WHY CAN’T WE JUST HAVE PUBLIC TRANSIT, FUCK! TRAINS EXIST!
Good to know, I’ll stay away from those damn things when I ride.
Good luck. They’re fucking everywhere, at least where I live.
I already do. Flip a coin: Heads, the car is operating itself and is therefore being operated by a moron. Tails, the owner is driving it manually and therefore it is being operated by a moron.
Just be sure to carefully watch your six when you’re sitting at a stoplight. I’ve gotten out of the habit of sitting right in the center of the lane, because the odds are getting ever higher that I’ll have to scoot out of the way of some imbecile who’s coming in hot. That’s hard to do when your front tire is 24" away from the license plate of the car in front of you.
For me it depends which bike I’m riding. If it’s my 49cc scooter, I’ll sit to the very right side of the lane for a quick escape while watching my mirrors like a hawk. On my XR500, I’ll just filter to the front (legal in Utah).
I filter to the front on my leg powered bike, most traffic light setups here have a region for bikes at the front of the cars.
Commuting in CA feels like I’m navigating a minefield 🤡
Trucks in general have gotten so big they are pedestrian deathtraps
