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.
In that case, you wouldn’t happen to know whether or not Teslas are unusually dangerous to bicycles too, would you?
Surprisingly, there is a data bucket for accidents with bicyclists, but hardly any bicycle crashes are reported.
That either means that they are not occurring (woohoo!), or that means they are being lumped in as one of the multiple pedestrian buckets (not woohoo!), or they are in the absolutely fucking vast collection of “severity: unknown” accidents where we have no details and Tesla requested redaction to make finding the details very difficult.
Thanks!