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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.
United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby said that SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet is its leading competitive advantage in the U.S. airline industry. However, in recent comments, while he described the service as “the biggest competitive advantage” the carrier currently holds, he also acknowledged that the edge is temporary.
“…everybody eventually is going to have high-speed low earth orbit internet connectivity. It’s going to be a must-have. We are going to have a few years of being the only airline that has it at scale, and that’s our mission,” Kirby said. Until everyone has it, United aims to capitalize on its head start by converting trial users into long-term loyal customers.
🚨 United CEO Scott Kirby calls Starlink “the biggest competitive advantage,” but says it’s temporary.
“I think it’s the biggest competitive advantage. And it’s temporary. Like it’s not, everybody eventually is going to have high speed low earth orbit internet connectivity. It’s going to be a must-have. But we are going to have a few years of being the only airline that has it at scale, and that’s our mission.”
“I think we’re going to convince customers that United is the best airline and we’re going to get customers to switch their loyalty, to get our credit card, switch their loyalty to United. Not because of Starlink. They’re going to try us for Starlink and they’re going to stay with all the other technology, and everything else is better, and the technology in particular is so much better than technology other, and it’s accelerating because we’ve got the right tech stack, and because we’re like, our gap is getting wider and wider with our technology every day.”
Next: LAX becomes United’s first 100% Starlink hub in the first half of next year, and the United app will show your Starlink odds for each flight. https://t.co/hToyFWaWj7
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) October 27, 2026
United has moved faster than its rivals on Starlink installations. As of mid-to-late October 2026, the system was on roughly 43 percent of its fleet, with plans to reach 61 percent by year-end, 87 percent by June 2027, and full fleet coverage by the end of next year.
The airline already operates more Starlink-equipped flights than the rest of the U.S. industry combined. Los Angeles International Airport is scheduled to become United’s first 100 percent Starlink hub in the first half of 2027, and the carrier’s app will display the likelihood that any given flight has the service.
Kirby has pointed to early evidence that the offering influences booking decisions. Some passengers loyal to other airlines are already switching flights for Starlink connectivity, something the airline, along with American Airlines, has tried to leverage against competing airlines. Both companies used status-match programs, and some of those customers are pursuing company-specific credit cards, which signals an intent to stay.
Once onboard, these customers encounter the airline’s broader investments in aircraft, larger seat-back screens, oversized bins, connection tools, and a mobile app that Kirby says outperforms competitors. Wi-Fi satisfaction scores on Starlink-equipped planes have been reported to be nearly double those on aircraft with other systems.
Competitors are moving slowly to do the same. Southwest Airlines began installations in 2025 and expects to complete them soon. Delta is pursuing Amazon’s Leo system, while American expects to start Starlink work in early 2027 and has not yet detailed regional-fleet plans. This timeline gap gives United a multi-year window in which it remains the only major U.S. carrier offering Starlink at scale.
Kirby has framed the strategy as pressing that advantage while simultaneously widening gaps in other technology areas so that customers who try United for the Wi-Fi remain for the overall experience.
The approach reflects a calculated bet that superior in-flight connectivity can accelerate share gains and support longer-term financial targets, including a 10 percent pre-tax margin goal.
High-speed internet is particularly valued by premium and business travelers who can work or stream reliably. As low-Earth-orbit service becomes ubiquitous, the temporary nature of the pure connectivity edge means United’s retention will depend on whether its other product and operational improvements keep pace.
Tesla Cybercab skips the traditional paint shop entirely, marking an unorthodox process for coloring the fully autonomous vehicle. However, the decision was a smart one, as it slashed factory costs, floor space utilization, and complexity, since Tesla relied on specialized alloys and in-mold coloring.
Munro Live was given the opportunity to do a factory walkthrough with Tesla Vice President of Vehicle Engineering Lars Moravy, who explained and detailed how Cybercab production at Giga Texas eliminates one of the automotive manufacturing industry’s most expensive and space-hungry elements.
A conventional paint line can cost hundreds of millions of dollars and require a million man-hours to build. Moravy framed the choice around Tesla’s core rule: “Question the requirements: why do you need paint?”
🚨 Super cool quote from the Cybercab breakdown on the decision to avoid traditional paint:
“One of the most expensive parts of the factory is a paint line… a few hundred million dollars, a million man hours to build one… rule number one at Tesla, question the requirements. Why do you need paint?… the alloys we use in the castings… don’t oxidize and reduce strength over time.” -@larsmoravy
Model Y and Cybertruck bodies are fully coated and painted. On Cybercab, only the side pieces get the anti-corrosion dip coat, and there’s no paint shop at all, which helps cut factory floor space per car by about 50%.
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) October 26, 2026
The structural answer lies in material selection. The aluminum alloys used in Cybercab’s front and rear castings do not oxidize and lose strength over time, the way many common automotive aluminum alloys do. Only the side modules, built around hot-stamped boron-steel door rings, receive an anti-corrosion e-coat, or dip coat. Front and rear modules skip coating altogether.
Model Y and Model 3 bodies, by contrast, are fully coated and painted.
Exterior colors come from the plastics shop, which Tesla engineers described as “our paint shop” for the Cybercab. Body panels are produced via reaction injection molding, referred to as RIM. Color is then mixed into a polyurethane resin at the mix head immediately before injection, so the panel emerges already colored with a Class-A surface.
Robots trim overflow to control sink marks and flow lines. The process avoids conventional spray-paint defects like orange peel and paint bleed. Scratches can still be repaired with compatible coatings that behave “basically like paint.” Because color is integral rather than a surface layer, shallow scratches do not expose a contrasting undercoat.
The secret behind Tesla’s Cybercab Gold goes well beyond just the color
Tesla has also explored related approaches, including in-mold lamination and painted films on stamped panels.
The manufacturing payoff is substantial because removing the paint shop, combined with the “unboxed” modular process that builds and tests front, rear, side, and center modules in parallel before a short final assembly, cuts factory floor space per vehicle by about 50 percent.
Final assembly itself uses only about 25 automated stations, far fewer than the typical Model Y line, and the overall line runs at about 78 percent automation, Moravy said. The approach also eliminates volatile organic compound emissions associated with traditional spray painting for these panels and shortens the coloring cycle from hours to minutes.
Cybercab’s paint strategy is clearly less about aesthetics than about systematically deleting capital-intensive, energy-heavy, and space-consuming steps once material science and process design make them unnecessary. It is a concrete example of Tesla applying first-principles questioning to one of the auto industry’s most entrenched factory requirements.
Investor's Corner
Tesla has a Cybercab problem nobody saw coming
Tesla’s Cybercab line now builds robotaxis faster than Tesla can deploy them, Lars Moravy says.
Tesla’s Cybercab line in Texas can now build the two seat robotaxi faster than the company can put it into service, according to Lars Moravy, Tesla’s Vice President of Vehicle Engineering. “We don’t run every day because the line can run so fast. It’s currently outpacing our deployments,” Moravy said in a new Cybercab deep dive from Munro Live. “So, it’s a bit of a race right now. Who’s going to go faster? Right now the manufacturing line’s ahead.”
Tesla’s official Robotaxi account shared a Cybercab analysis video on X on Monday, calling it a “Cybercab engineering deep dive.” Moravy’s comments go further than what he told analysts on the Q3 earnings call last week, when he said the Cybercab line’s listed capacity of more than 125,000 units a year undersells what it can actually run.
The tour shows where that speed comes from. Tesla’s unboxed process splits the Cybercab into front, rear, side and center modules that are built and tested on their own before they meet on a short final line. That final line has just 25 fully automated stations, which Tesla’s team estimated is a fifth to a tenth of what a Model Y needs. The full line is about 78% automated, the framing line is already at 100%, and the layout uses roughly 50% less floor space per vehicle. The stated goal is “100% automation in 10 second cycle time,” or one finished Cybercab every 10 seconds.
Tesla also deleted the paint shop. Only the side modules are coated, and the exterior panels get their color inside the molding machine. Engineers said the car is designed to run at least 500,000 miles, which matters for a vehicle that will spend most of its day carrying riders.
The battery got the same treatment. The Cybercab uses an 88S6P pack of 4680 cells in a steel enclosure, a first for Tesla, with each module potted separately so a single failed module can be swapped instead of the whole pack. Wireless battery management boards replace a wiring harness, and new contactors are fast enough to drop the pyro fuse entirely. Tesla’s battery director graded the pack an A minus, compared with a D for the Model Y structural pack and a B minus for Cybertruck. Up front, the drive unit runs an 11:1 gear ratio versus roughly 9:1 on most Teslas, since the Cybercab does not need a high top speed.
Cybercab engineering deep dive — Robotaxi (@robotaxi) October 26, 2026
The deployment side is now the bottleneck Moravy described. Tesla had more than 50 Cybercabs working the Formula 1 weekend in Austin, and Texas records show 463 Cybercabs registered. Tesla said on its earnings call that Cybercab service will launch in Dallas next month, and Moravy said the company is aiming to get Cybercabs to customers by the end of 2026. Every unit built so far has gone into Tesla’s own fleet since the line moved into volume production in April.
Munro Live also asked when it could get a Cybercab to tear down. Tesla’s answer: “Not yet.”
Starlink is ‘biggest competitive advantage,’ but it’s temporary, United CEO says
Tesla Cybercab’s unorthodox paint process explained
