I thought previous lawsuits would've forced Tesla to call it "Advanced Driver Assist" or something.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HR_Y_yf84m8
Holy shit, it looks like it was going at full highway speeds (at least) in a residential neighborhood. Doesn't look like it attempts to stop or steer away at any point. This seems like the outcome one would expect from a passed-out driver and a stuck accelerator. I'm honestly amazed that the driver survived.
If not then I suspect a Tesla will turn out to be quite surprisingly forgetful about what it was up to in a road traffic collision.
RTC is a UK term that took over from RTA (road traffic accident) - it describes what happened rather than heading off into the weeds as to cause.
Idk, the death-toll gap between Tesla and Waymo seems to tell a story enough.
Note: it’s important to distinguish between Autopilot and FSD here. “Autopilot” is Tesla’s old assisted driving stack that comes free in most vehicles and has had no significant updates in years. “FSD” is an entirely different software stack that only works with newer vehicles and that Tesla charges $$ for. It’s much more advanced and IMO a lot safer.
This article never mentions FSD, only Autopilot.
Maybe NTSB will.
Certainly Tesla will. And that will inform how their PR team responds to this collision.
Maybe some plaintiffs will if they can manage to subpoena the data from Tesla in some hypothetical future court case.
The reason I will never buy a Tesla is because it is one of the most advanced surveillance systems against the driver, but there is no one empowered to inspect the car / company (comprehensively, not superficially).
> I seriously doubt FSD would drive into a house.
Strawman. You seem to be insinuating that FSD intended to aim for a house. Usually the chain of events would start with something like “FSD was engaged on the road and in the intended lane” then “FSD lost track of the boundary of the lane” or maybe “FSD identified an obstruction in the lane so it maneuvered out of lane”.
I believe autopilot would totally run into a house. It doesn't respect stop signs or red lights. If the house is at a T intersection the autopilot might try to drive right through it. I agree about FSD though
1) I’ve put enough kms on FSD - it’s taken me across Australia a few times, probably 10,000kms in total - to know that it isn’t going to drive into a house.
2) Even if FSD is enabled, there’s loads of things you can do to create an accident like press the brakes or accelerator pedals, which doesn’t necessarily disengage FSD right away, so let’s just wait for the telemetry to get released.
3) Regardless of who was controlling it, why did this guy let his car jump the kerb and go through a house? Why was he going fast enough?
Sad for all involved.
Edit: my experience is HW4 by the way.
1. The cameras only show while operating in reverse;
2. The warning entirely obscures 30-50% of the view in one or more cameras;
3. The warning tells you that there is dirt or debris on the camera.
So, you are warned, that your vision, via the cameras could be better -- by deliberately worsening the view.
Genius.
"Hey, we sent you over the new firmware for the component, check it out." (The test suite for this component takes approximately 36 hours to execute.)
Three hours later:
"This is working so much better, thanks a lot!"
"???"
"Oh, we just flashed a car we have here and took it out for a drive."
"?!?"
Oof.
I don’t understand why a person would need FSD in a suburb street.
My parents have a Tesla. It’s convenient. I engage my Subaru’s lane-keeping in suburbs, too, to reduce driver fatigue.
The Subaru behaves predictably. The Tesla is mostly more capable, but does something dumbfucked and dangerous every few dozen trips.
Fatigue is not the only, or even the biggest, risk to driving safely. Being distracted is frequently one of the biggest risks.
Either the driver or someone at Tesla (their pick, who cares).
This cannot go unpunished.
Machines can never be held accountable.
Tesla themselves got into trouble after previous crashes and are finally telling their drivers to keep their hands on the wheel at all times, and toned down their false advertising.
But FSD doesn't abide by speed limits, and Waymo does, and it is truly self-driving.
So, it's all bullshit. Since day one, it's never been a real attempt at autonomous, legal, safe driving.
Ultimately the driver is responsible.
Edit: For the folks who seem to think that this is marketed as unsupervised self driving, from Teslas own website it states
“Currently enabled features require active driver supervision and do not make the vehicle autonomous.”
Recent lawsuits [1] seem to suggest both are. The driver committed manslaughter and should go to jail. The company sold a dangerous product that killed someone and should pay massive damages.
[1] https://electrek.co/2026/04/16/tesla-facing-up-to-14-billion...
Surely, we can trust Tesla will be providing all relevant information to the authorities without delay.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/08/29/tesla-a...
Is it possible FSD on this vehicle was a different version? Can't FSD change from one drive to the next, based on software updates or even external conditions?
Perhaps you drove in a different region with differing conditions?
> 3) Regardless of who was controlling it, why did this guy let his car jump the kerb and go through a house? Why was he going fast enough?
Why is it called "Full Self Driving" if the person behind the wheel must control (or even just monitor) the speed?
Agreed.
He's driven it "across Australia". Which means long straight highways for hundreds and hundreds of miles at a time (then recharge, then do long straight highway for hundreds and hundreds of miles), and often fairly lightly trafficked:
https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Perth,+Western+Australia,+Au...
Like... absolutely shocking that FSD performs decently on well maintained, largely straight highway in generally clear desert conditions. Surely this is indicative of its behavior everywhere else! /s
That's how you sound
There are decades worth of man-machines UX research to prove this: the more you lean on automated systems to perform a manual task, like specific vehicle operations, the more your reaction time and relefexes for that specific motor skill will suffer.
Non-level 4 driver assistance tech should only be used for helping prevent accidents and not pretend to be actual full self driving
https://futurism.com/tesla-nhtsa-autopilot-report
I also don't trust the motives of a company that names something "Full Self Driving" knowing it's not fully self driving. Never mind their shenanigans around avoiding or disregarding regulations and reporting requirements.
They also considered AEB-activation to mean that meant that FSD wasn't active, even if AEB only kicked in because of FSD's decisions.
Life and death policies being made by people who last week you were arguing about whether using Kubernetes is worth it for a throwaway project, or whether tabs or spaces are more appropriate.
I guess I’m not saying it’s impossible, but I think at this stage it’s improbable.
Do you think there's some magic going on here?
It’s tough to say given many data sources are aggregated. For what it’s worth, my parents’ car is a Tesla with FSD and I’ve stopped it from, off the top of my head, racing into a red-lit intersection, running over a small dog and running into a closing garage door.
I still use it. It mostly works. But I’m vigilantly monitoring it in a way that isn’t supported by Tesla’s marketing (which frequently shows drivers engaging it hands off).
I’m surprised about the red lights and animals, however: ours seems very cautious around any kind of live animal on the road, even braking and manoeuvring to avoid birds on the road. It’s not so good at avoiding the corpses of already dead ones, however (bump!).
Why not? That’s likely to come up at minimum thousands of times per day, and likely vastly more as the system improves.
Both only happened once. But they were shocking when they did. (To be fair, my Subaru tried to push me into oncoming traffic because it was avoiding a “collision” from the guy in the other lane turning weirdly. Turned at collision-avoidance feature off.)
I'm not sure the point you're making here - that just sounds like "Tesla couldn't care less about updating their software and it's still "not good". People it hits are still dead. "Oh well, it's not like Tesla had updated the software, so you can't blame them".
That way everyone would get the safety advantages of FSD, including the really important stuff like better driver attention monitoring. Unfortunately, Tesla keeps Autopilot bad because it forces more people to pay for FSD, and in this case they seem to care more about profits than safety.
They show a 2D representation to the driver because that’s good enough for drivers, but I wouldn’t assume that represents how the system operates internally at every stage. Even navigating requires the concept of bridges crossing roads without intersecting them.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47783427
AFAIK, there's no issue with bridges that cross roads, however. It will just ignore a road that's above or below the one you're travelling on that doesn't intersect with yours. Just like a human driver would do.
At scale you can “have issues” and still work 99% of the time. If it’s completely incapable of handling railroad crossings that’s relatively easy to verify.
> AFAIK, there's no issue with bridges that cross roads, however. It will just ignore a road that's above or below the one you're travelling on that doesn't intersect with yours. Just like a human driver would do.
As a user of the system that’s worked it all out it’s not an issue for you, but getting that behavior from raw sensor data is non trivial.