A major Reuters investigation published today reveals that Tesla’s widely touted “Full Self-Driving” safety statistics are built on deeply flawed methodology — and that the company’s own data labelers, the workers who train the AI system, don’t trust the technology to drive them.
The report, based on interviews with nine former Tesla data labelers, a former self-driving engineer, and 11 traffic-safety researchers, paints a damning picture of the gap between Tesla’s safety marketing and the reality of its autonomous driving program.
Tesla’s safety stats inflated by a factor of 3
We’ve been calling out Tesla’s misleading FSD safety claims for a while now, and the Reuters investigation confirms the core problem with hard data.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk and other executives have repeatedly claimed that “Full Self-Driving” is up to 10 times safer than human drivers. Tesla CFO Vaibhav Taneja first made this claim last July, and Tesla Board Chair Robyn Denholm repeated it at a November shareholder meeting. Musk himself displayed a chart at that meeting claiming “85% less crashes.”
Reuters found that a central comparison error inflated Tesla’s claimed safety level by a factor of three. Tesla counted crashes where airbags deployed in its own vehicles, then compared that number to federal data that includes all crashes requiring a tow truck — a far less severe threshold. Tow-truck crashes often don’t involve airbag deployments at all.
The critical point: the federal data Tesla used already included airbag-deployment crashes as a separate category. Tesla could have made a valid apples-to-apples comparison but chose not to.
When University of Michigan researcher Marco Benedetti performed the correct comparison — airbag crashes for Teslas versus airbag crashes for all vehicles — the result dropped from “10 times safer” to roughly three times farther between crashes. And even that figure is unreliable because of additional methodological problems, including the massive age gap between Tesla’s fleet (4.1 years average) and the overall U.S. fleet (12.8 years).
As Carnegie Mellon professor Phil Koopman put it: “It’s like saying: ‘My jet airplane is faster than your World War II bomber.’ Yeah, so, what’s your point?”
Ten of the 11 traffic-safety researchers who reviewed Tesla’s methodology for Reuters said the statistics amounted to misleading marketing rather than a serious safety investigation.
‘Don’t trust Elon on this’
Beyond the statistics, the Reuters report reveals what Tesla employees actually think about the technology they help build.
Seven of the nine former data labelers told Reuters they wouldn’t trust FSD to drive them. One said he wouldn’t ride in a Tesla robotaxi “if you fucking paid me.” A veteran self-driving engineer who reviewed Tesla crash data for years called the company’s safety claims “bullshit” and said: “Definitely, don’t trust Elon on this.”
The data labelers, based primarily in a Utah office, review video footage from the eight exterior cameras on Tesla vehicles using FSD. They described regularly seeing FSD fail at basic tasks: pulling over for emergency vehicles, giving motorcyclists enough space, braking on freeway off-ramps, and avoiding construction zones. In one incident, a Tesla drove into a construction zone and nearly struck workers.
A specialized team in Palo Alto, known internally as the “trauma team,” focused specifically on near-misses with pedestrians. Former employees described seeing clips of FSD-piloted Teslas nearly hitting children and failing to recognize pedestrians in crosswalks.
The report also details FSD regularly exceeding speed limits by 20 to 30 mph after Tesla introduced a “Mad Max” mode for more aggressive driving, with one labeler reporting an FSD vehicle traveling 60 mph in a 25-mph zone.
The robotaxi mapping that undermines Musk’s key claim
One of the most significant findings in the Reuters investigation is how Tesla extensively mapped its robotaxi operating zones before public launches — directly contradicting Musk’s central claim that Tesla’s approach doesn’t require the “laborious local mapping” used by rivals like Waymo.
For weeks before the October 2024 Cybercab unveiling at the Warner Bros. studio lot, staff tested prototypes every night from 6 p.m. until dawn, collecting video of the exact routes the cars would follow. Data labelers spent hundreds of hours annotating curbs and road markings to prevent embarrassing incidents.
The same thing happened before the Austin robotaxi launch in June 2025. Tesla extensively filmed features in the limited robotaxi zone to map stop lights, road signs, and other features. The Utah data-labeling staff doubled to about 300 workers in the six months before launch, working primarily on making the Austin test go smoothly.
We’ve previously reported on how Tesla’s robotaxi expansion looked more like a stock pump than a genuine scaling effort, and more recently that the fleet is actually shrinking rather than growing. The Reuters report now explains why scaling is so difficult: the labor-intensive safeguards Tesla deploys for each launch zone are extremely difficult to replicate broadly.
Nearly a year after the Austin launch, Tesla still operates only about 20 unsupervised robotaxis there, traversing a limited and carefully mapped zone. Some still have human safety monitors in the front seat.
As one former employee told Reuters about the Austin zone: “You can’t get creative outside of that.”
A growing pile of investigations and lawsuits
The Reuters report arrives at a time when Tesla faces mounting regulatory scrutiny over FSD. NHTSA currently has four active investigations into FSD and Autopilot, including a probe into dozens of cases where FSD ran red lights or turned into oncoming traffic, and an investigation into whether Tesla’s 2023 Autopilot recall was sufficient.
Tesla was also hit with a $243 million verdict after an Autopilot crash in Florida killed a 22-year-old woman, and the company has struggled to turn over FSD traffic violation data to NHTSA investigators.
Musk told shareholders in November that Tesla would soon let drivers text while using FSD. Six months later, the company hasn’t done so, and its own FSD website continues to warn: “Currently enabled features require active driver supervision and do not make the vehicle autonomous.”
Electrek’s Take
None of this is surprising to anyone who has been paying close attention. We’ve been documenting FSD’s pattern of repeated safety claims that don’t hold up, version after version, year after year. What the Reuters investigation adds is the internal perspective — and it’s devastating.
The fact that Tesla’s own data labelers, the people who see FSD’s performance every single day, overwhelmingly don’t trust the system to drive them should tell you everything you need to know about the gap between Musk’s promises and reality.
The statistical methodology issue is particularly damning because it’s not a subtle error. Tesla had access to the correct comparison data and chose to use a metric that inflated its safety claims by 3x. That’s not a choice you make by accident. And when 10 out of 11 independent traffic-safety researchers call your safety report “misleading marketing,” you have a credibility problem that no software update can fix.
A growing issue is that while this is happening, FSD is undoubtedly getting better — at least for vehicles equipped with HW4. It’s getting so good that more people are becoming complacent with it, which is where it becomes increasingly dangerous.
While it makes significantly fewer mistakes than it did a year ago, if the drivers are feeling so confident that they are not paying attention when those few mistakes arise, it becomes more dangerous.
I don’t think Tesla is doing enough to address this complacency problem.
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