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.
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…
I mean yeah, I just said above that someone almost killed me. They were probably a human driver. But that’s a “might happen, never know.” If self driving cars are rear-ending people, that’s an inherent artifact of it’s programming, even though it’s not intentionally programmed to do that.
So it’s like, things were already bad. I already do not feel safe doing any biking anymore. But as self driving cars become more prevalent, that threat upgrades to a kind of defacto, “Oh, these vast stretches of land are places where only cars and trucks are allowed. Everything else is roadkill waiting to happen.”