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Do autonomous cars make us worse drivers?
Autonomous cars are coming. So is the first fatality associated with them. Statistically, that milestone should occur in the next 18 months. What will happen then?
On May 31, 2009, an Airbus 330 on its way from Rio de Janiero to Paris plunged from an altitude of 35,000 feet into the Atlantic, killing all 228 people on board. Just prior to the crash, the airplane was operating in autopilot mode. A reconstruction of the disaster revealed input from several sensors had been compromised by ice that caused them to give false readings. Updated sensors that were less susceptible to ice accumulation were waiting to be installed after the plane arrived in Paris.
Because of the false readings the autopilot system disengaged returning control to the pilots however the senior pilot was sleeping at the time. The two junior pilots were not as highly trained in high altitude flight as they might have been, partly because the use of machines to control aircraft under those conditions was the norm.
Faced with the unexpected, the pilots behaved poorly. At one point they are heard to say on the cockpit recorder, “We completely lost control of the airplane, and we don’t understand anything! We tried everything!” While they tried to rouse the sleeping senior pilot, the nose of the aircraft climbed until a stall was induced. Stall is the point at which the wings become barn doors instead of airfoils. The Airbus 330 dropped from the sky like a rock.
In his excellent story about the crash published on Vanity Fair, William Langewiesche offered this conclusion: “Automation has made it more and more unlikely that ordinary airline pilots will ever have to face a raw crisis in flight—but also more and more unlikely that they will be able to cope with such a crisis if one arises.”
The Tesla community has seen similar instances lately. The driver in Salt Lake City who accidentally activated Summon, causing his car to drive into the back of a truck. The woman on a freeway in California who rear ended a car that suddenly slowed in front of her. The man in Europe who crashed into the back of a van that had stalled in the high speed lane of a highway. He at least had the courage to admit his error. “Yes, I could have reacted sooner, but when the car slows down correctly 1,000 times, you trust it to do it the next time to. My bad.”
After each of these incidents, the tendency has been for many to defend the machine and blame the human. But in a recent article for The Guardian, author Martin Robbins says, “Combine an autopilot with a good driver, and you get an autopilot with, if not a bad driver, at least not such a good one.” He says that statistically, the time when a car operating in autonomous mode causes a fatality is rapidly approaching.
Tesla Model S owner crashes into the back of a stalled van
On average, a person is killed in a traffic accident in the United States once every 100 million miles. Elon Musk says Tesla’s Autopilot is half as likely to be involved in a collision as a human driver. That would suggest that somewhere around the 200 million mile mark someone will die as a result of an automobile driven by a machine.
Tesla has already passed the 100 million mile mark for cars driving in Autopilot mode and continues to log 2.6 million miles driven per day. Statistically speaking, the time when a self driving car kills somebody is rapidly approaching. And since most autonomous cars on the road are Teslas, the odds are excellent it will be a Tesla that is involved in that first fatality.
What will happen then? Robbins goes back in history to look for an answer to that question. In 1896, Bridgit Driscoll became the first person in England to be killed by a motor car. The reaction among the public and the press was a fatalistic acceptance that progress will have a price. Within a few years, the speed limit in England was raised from 8 mph — which is was when Ms. Driscoll was killed — to 20 mph. This despite the fact that thousands of road deaths were being recorded on English roads by then.
Regulators around the world are racing to catch up with the explosion of new autonomous driving technology. But Robbins concludes, “By the time they do, it’s likely that the technology will already be an accepted fact of life, its safety taken for granted by consumers, its failures written off as the fault of its error-prone human masters.”
The point is that injuries and fatalities will continue to occur as cars come to rely more and more on machines for routine driving chores. But in that transition period between now and the time when Level 4 autonomy becomes the norm — the day when cars come from the factory with no way for humans to control them directly — we need to accept that complacency and an inflated belief in the power of machines to protect us from harm may actually render us less competent behind the wheel.
We will need to remain vigilant, if for no other reason than telling a jury “It’s not my fault! The machine failed!” is not going to insulate us from the legal requirement to operate our private automobiles in a safe and prudent manner.
Tesla Cybercab is set to launch in Austin, Texas, on September 3, as the company has officially started sending out invitations to a dedicated event it will hold in the city where its headquarters is located.
The Cybercab is Tesla’s dedicated ride-sharing vehicle: it features just two seats and has no steering wheel or pedals. It is aimed at fully autonomous passenger transport, and will operate in the Robotaxi fleet alongside the Tesla Model Y, which has been performing driverless rides for real-world passengers for more than a year.
Thank you so much @Tesla for inviting us to the Cybercab launch in Austin! 🤠 pic.twitter.com/F1rAR8zd5O
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) August 22, 2026
The launch of the Cybercab marks the next chapter in Tesla’s autonomy story. The company has been developing autonomous transport for years with its Full Self-Driving (Supervised) platform, which is available in any vehicle the company has built with the proper hardware and software capabilities.
Its capabilities vary by hardware and software version, but Tesla says its latest hardware version, known as AI4, can deliver full autonomy. However, future vehicles will operate with even more robust hardware packages, as Tesla will develop AI4.5 and AI5 for even more capability in its vehicles.
Following a report from The Information that surfaced earlier this week, the writing was on the wall that Tesla was set to launch Cybercab in the near term. The report stated Tesla could launch Cybercab as soon as the end of August. Tesla came close and has booked it for September 3.
The big thing with this event being scheduled is not necessarily that Tesla is launching a new vehicle, but instead that it is launching a vehicle that has no steering wheel or pedals and will operate exclusively on a self-driving program that is evidently nearing full autonomy. If the event allows vehicles to take passengers on public roads and drop them off wherever they please within the City of Austin, it will be a drastic advancement in the company’s self-driving story.
People have ridden in Cybercab previously: Tesla had the “We, Robot” event in October 2024, which allowed people to experience fully autonomous rides in a closed circuit at Warner Bros. Studios in Burbank.
🚨 Ride in a Tesla Cybercab with us
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) May 11, 2025
Additionally, Tesla launched employee rides in Cybercab in July.
It’s a drastic step forward for Tesla, whose CEO, Elon Musk, has promised for years that the company would release a fully autonomous vehicle and platform capable of allowing drivers to relinquish any responsibility behind the wheel.
Elon Musk put a number on where he thinks SpaceX’s Starship program is headed by 2030, replying on X a day after President Trump signed a memo pushing the country toward 1,000 space launches and reentries a year.
The exchange started when Aaron Burnett, co-founder of propulsion startup Mach 33, posted that “1,000 launches/reentries is the goal,” quoting White House science adviser Michael Kratsios on the newly signed National Space Transportation Policy. Burnett noted that the FAA’s own bull-case forecast reached only 385 annual launches by 2030, while his firm’s conservative model already put SpaceX alone near 940. Musk responded, “We’re aiming to reach 30+ Starship launches/day in 2030, which is ~10k annualized. Still tiny numbers compared to airplane flights!”
We’re aiming to reach 30+ Starship launches/day in 2030, which is ~10k annualized.
Still tiny numbers compared to airplane flights!
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 21, 2026
That figure is specific to Starship, the rocket SpaceX is still developing for orbital and lunar missions, not the Falcon 9 fleet that carries most of the company’s current launch volume. Starship has flown twice this year, a slower pace than the four and five flights SpaceX managed in 2024 and 2025. Getting from two flights a year to 30 a day is the scale of jump the new federal policy is meant to clear regulatory room for.
Trump’s memo, signed Thursday, directs agencies to identify new launch and reentry sites on federal land, including a new reentry site within 90 days, and to speed up the permitting and environmental reviews that have long slowed cadence growth. It also sets a goal of returning American astronauts to the moon by 2028 and placing initial lunar base elements by 2030, tying the launch buildout directly to NASA’s Artemis program.
SpaceX has already been pushing the FAA toward higher numbers on its own. The agency approved up to 44 annual Starship launches from Kennedy Space Center in February, on top of a 2024 review that raised the cap at Starbase in Texas to 25 a year. Those approvals cover a fraction of the 10,000 annual flights Musk is now describing, which shows how far current permitting still sits from the administration’s stated target.
The near-term test of all this is more modest. SpaceX cleared a full-duration, six-engine static fire on its next Starship vehicle this week, the last major hardware checkpoint before Flight 14, which is targeting no earlier than August 28 and is expected to attempt the vehicle’s first full orbital mission. Musk said last week that a tower catch of the upper stage is still probably months away, a reminder that the immediate roadmap remains far more incremental than the daily launch numbers he just posted.
Tesla will resolve its massive recall of nearly three million vehicles in China with stickers and a software update.
On Friday, Chinese regulators filed recall plans against Tesla, Xiaomi, Leapmotor, Xpeng, Chery, Geely, Dongfeng, Arcfox, and FAW to resolve what is essentially a carbon-copy issue throughout each of the companies’ vehicle models: emergency door release latches are simply not visible enough.
Tesla door handle saga gets its latest chapter and a big change is coming
The companies will be required to add things that will make these latches, which will open the door in the event of an emergency, more visible. Of the 7 million vehicles impacted, Tesla accounts for 2,975,910 units. More than 1.9 million of those are Model Y vehicles, with the rest, just over 970,000, being Model 3s.
To resolve the issue, Tesla is going to add warning labels to the emergency latches free of charge, and then utilize an Over-the-Air update to add a post-crash window-lowering strategy, according to CNEVpost.
This massive effort to fix the all-electric Model Y and Model 3’s emergency latch system comes just months after several probes across various markets identified the trouble some had identifying this latch. Those who had gotten involved in car accidents that stripped the vehicle of its power were not aware that every Tesla has emergency door latches.
China’s State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR) said that severe crashes that disable a vehicle’s low-voltage system could not only hinder occupants from getting out, but also make it more difficult for emergency response workers to gain entry.
SAMR is starting to tighten the regulations it has on door handles on vehicles. A new mandatory national standard will take effect for all models starting January 1, 2027, and will require all doors to be equipped with mechanical release mechanisms. This will effectively end purely electronic door handles. Models already on sale with type approval have been granted a two-year transition period, which will enable things to change until January 2029.
Tesla will launch Cybercab on September 3
SpaceX and a new Trump order that could rewrite the next decade of launches
