News
Tesla posts stern response to Washington Post’s article on alleged Autopilot dangers
Tesla has posted a stern response to a recent article from The Washington Post that suggested that the electric vehicle maker is putting people at risk because it allows systems like Autopilot to be deployed in areas that it was not designed for. The publication noted that it was able to identify about 40 fatal or serious crashes since 2016, and at least eight of them happened in roads where Autopilot was not designed to be used in the first place.
Overall, the Washington Post article argued that while Tesla does inform drivers that they are responsible for their vehicles while Autopilot is engaged, the company is nonetheless also at fault since it allows its driver-assist system to be deployed irresponsibly. “Even though the company has the technical ability to limit Autopilot’s availability by geography, it has taken few definitive steps to restrict use of the software,” the article read.
In its response, which was posted through its official account on X, Tesla highlighted that it is very serious about keeping both its customers and pedestrians safe. The company noted that the data is clear about the fact that systems like Autopilot, when used safety, drastically reduce the number of accidents on the road. The company also reiterated the fact that features like Traffic Aware Cruise Control are Level 2 systems, which require constant supervision from the driver.
Following is the pertinent section of Tesla’s response.
While there are many articles that do not accurately convey the nature of our safety systems, the recent Washington Post article is particularly egregious in its misstatements and lack of relevant context.
We at Tesla believe that we have a moral obligation to continue improving our already best-in-class safety systems. At the same time, we also believe it is morally indefensible not to make these systems available to a wider set of consumers, given the incontrovertible data that shows it is saving lives and preventing injury.
Regulators around the globe have a duty to protect consumers, and the Tesla team looks forward to continuing our work with them towards our common goal of eliminating as many deaths and injuries as possible on our roadways.
Below are some important facts, context and background.
Background
1. Safety metrics are emphatically stronger when Autopilot is engaged than when not engaged.
a. In the 4th quarter of 2022, we recorded one crash for every 4.85 million miles driven in which drivers were using Autopilot technology. For drivers who were not using Autopilot technology, we recorded one crash for every 1.40 million miles driven. By comparison, the most recent data available from NHTSA and FHWA (from 2021) shows that in the United States there was an automobile crash approximately every 652,000 miles.
b. The data is clear: The more automation technology offered to support the driver, the safer the driver and other road users. Anecdotes from the WaPo article come from plaintiff attorneys—cases involving significant driver misuse—and are not a substitute for rigorous analysis and billions of miles of data.
c. Recent Data continues this trend and is even more compelling. Autopilot is ~10X safer than US average and ~5X safer than a Tesla with no AP tech enabled. More detailed information will be publicly available in the near future.
2. Autopilot features, including Traffic-Aware Cruise Control and Autosteer, are SAE Level 2 driver-assist systems, meaning –
a. Whether the driver chooses to engage Autosteer or not, the driver is in control of the vehicle at all times. The driver is notified of this responsibility, consents, agrees to monitor the driving assistance, and can disengage anytime.
b. Despite the driver being responsible for control for the vehicle, Tesla has a number of additional safety measures designed to monitor that drivers engage in active driver supervision, including torque-based and camera-based monitoring. We have continued to make progress in improving these monitoring systems to reduce misuse.
c. Based on the above, among other factors, the data strongly indicates our customers are far safer by having the choice to decide when it is appropriate to engage Autopilot features. When used properly, it provides safety benefits on all road classes.
Tesla also provided some context about some of the crashes that were highlighted by The Washington Post. As per the electric vehicle maker, the incidents that the publication cited involved drivers who were not using Autopilot correctly. The publication, therefore, omitted several important facts when it was framing its narrative around Autopilot’s alleged risks, Tesla argued.
Following is the pertinent section of Tesla’s response.
The Washington Post leverages instances of driver misuse of the Autopilot driver assist feature to suggest the system is the problem. The article got it wrong, misreporting what’s actually alleged in the pending lawsuit and omitting several important facts:
1. Contrary to the Post article, the Complaint doesn’t reference complacency or Operational Design Domain.
2. Instead, the Complaint acknowledges the harms of driver inattention, misuse, and negligence.
3. Mr. Angulo and the parents of Ms. Benavides who tragically died in the crash, first sued the Tesla driver—and settled with him—before ever pursuing a claim against Tesla.
4. The Benavides lawsuit alleges the Tesla driver “carelessly and/or recklessly” “drove through the intersection…ignoring the controlling stop sign and traffic signal.”
5. The Tesla driver didn’t blame Tesla, didn’t sue Tesla, didn’t try to get Tesla to pay on his behalf. He took responsibility.
6. The Post had the driver’s statements to police and reports that he said he was “driving on cruise.” They omit that he also admitted to police “I expect to be the driver and be responsible for this.”
7. The driver later testified in the litigation he knew Autopilot didn’t make the car self-driving and he was the driver, contrary to the Post and Angulo claims that he was mislead, over-reliant or complacent. He readily and repeatedly admitted:
a. “I was highly aware that was still my responsibility to operate the vehicle safely.”
b. He agreed it was his “responsibility as the driver of the vehicle, even with Autopilot activated, to drive safely and be in control of the vehicle at all times.”
c. “I would say specifically I was aware that the car was my responsibility. I didn’t read all these statements and passages, but I’m aware the car was my responsibility.”
8. The Post also failed to disclose that Autopilot restricted the vehicle’s speed to 45 mph (the speed limit) based on the road type, but the driver was pressing the accelerator to maintain 60 mph when he ran the stop sign and caused the crash. The car displayed an alert to the driver that, because he was overriding Autopilot with the accelerator, “Cruise control will not brake.”
While there are many articles that do not accurately convey the nature of our safety systems, the recent Washington Post article is particularly egregious in its misstatements and lack of relevant context.
We at Tesla believe that we have a moral obligation to continue…
— Tesla (@Tesla) December 12, 2023
Don’t hesitate to contact us with news tips. Just send a message to simon@teslarati.com to give us a heads up.
Lifestyle
Tesla wins over Netflix’s Selling Sunset star, who’s now ditching his Bentley
Selling Sunset’s Jason Oppenheim swapped his Bentley for a Tesla and promised ten for employees.
Jason Oppenheim, the luxury real estate broker best known as the star of Netflix’s Selling Sunset, has parked his Bentley for good and moved into a Tesla Model Y, and he says Full Self-Driving (Supervised) is the reason.
Oppenheim, who founded The Oppenheim Group, the Los Angeles brokerage at the center of the show, posted a video to X on Saturday evening that he called “the most important video I’ve ever posted.” In it, he rides from Newport Beach to his firm’s Los Angeles office, a trip he put at roughly an hour and 15 minutes, while FSD handles the drive and parks the car without him touching the wheel or the accelerator. He said he handed the Bentley to his father because he no longer has any use for it.
Tesla shared the clip from its main account on X about two hours later, pulling out the quote that has since spread well beyond the Tesla community:
“[FSD Supervised] is life-changing. I was on the phone with my brother last night, and I made him buy one. He literally bought one while we were talking. I’m buying 10 of my employees a Tesla with FSD. It’s 8x safer than the average driver. There’s nothing more important than the safety of you and your loved ones.”
Oppenheim was candid about why the safety pitch landed with him. He admitted in the video that he is a distracted driver who answers emails and texts behind the wheel, and framed the employee purchases as a way to keep his team off their phones while driving. Elon Musk posted “Tesla FSD feels like magic” less than half an hour after the video went live.
The endorsement lands at a convenient moment for Tesla. The company delivered 486,532 vehicles in Q3, beating Wall Street’s estimates and marking its best quarter ever without the $7,500 federal EV tax credit.
A public service announcement. https://t.co/NYa1IpKwBX
— Jason Oppenheim (@OppenheimJason) October 4, 2026
Tesla FSD has been subscription only in the U.S. since February at $99 per month, and Tesla said in its Q2 update that active subscriptions hit 1.48 million, up 56 percent year over year, with more than 55 percent of new North American deliveries leaving with FSD attached. That attach rate is the figure Ron Baron cited last month when he told CNBC “the time to buy the stock is now.” At current pricing, Oppenheim’s 10 employee cars alone would add $990 a month, or about $11,880 a year, in FSD revenue.
Tesla AI head Ashok Elluswamy said in July that FSD had logged more than 12 billion miles while going roughly twice as far between collisions as manual driving. FSD also remains a supervised system, so Oppenheim and his employees are still required to watch the road, even as Tesla rolls out v14.3.10 with Automatic Collision Evasion, which can steer or brake on its own to avoid a frontal crash.
Elon Musk
Elon Musk follows Trump’s lead, says a SpaceX name change is coming
Elon Musk says SpaceXAI will become SpaceXSI, marking its second rebrand in under three months.
Elon Musk wants to rename his artificial intelligence company again, less than three months after its last rebrand.
In a string of posts on X early Sunday morning, Musk wrote “No more AI,” followed by “SI” and “It’s better.” He then added, “SpaceX is a super intelligence company.” When a user asked whether SpaceXAI could become SpaceXSI, Musk replied, “Yes, we will make that change.”
The posts extend a terminology push that began at the White House last week. On September 29, President Donald Trump signed an executive order directing federal agencies to replace “artificial intelligence” and “AI” with “Super Intelligence” and “SI” on government websites, policy documents and press releases. The same day, Musk sat beside Trump as the heads of the largest AI companies signed a voluntary safety accord, as Teslarati reported. Speaking to reporters afterward, Musk caught himself mid sentence: “I think it is worth highlighting the positive benefits of A.I. … S.I., pardon me.”
Elon Musk and Trump are closer than ever, and Tesla could be the big winner
SpaceXSI would be the third name for the business since February. SpaceX acquired xAI on February 2 in a deal that valued the combined company at $1.25 trillion. In May, Musk said xAI would be dissolved as a separate company, and on July 6 the division adopted the SpaceXAI name and a new logo that placed the xAI letters inside the SpaceX identity.
Musk gave no timeline. He did not say whether SpaceXSI would be a legal name change or a branding update, whether the @SpaceXAI handle on X would change, or how the shift would apply to products like Grok. The company had not issued a formal announcement as of Sunday morning.
The change would reach well beyond a chatbot. SpaceXAI now houses Grok, the X platform, the Colossus training clusters in Memphis and the coding tool Cursor, which SpaceX acquired in August. It also runs the orbital compute effort SpaceX is building around Nvidia hardware, which Musk said during the company’s first earnings call would be exclusive to Nvidia.
It’s unclear if rivals like Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Meta and Nvidia have plans to also rename their companies or products. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has continued to say “AI” in public, while Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has gone partway, describing data centers as “super intelligence factories.”
The rename would also line up SpaceX’s AI branding with the federal government’s language as Musk takes on a new advisory role at the Pentagon, where he is helping lead the Project Meridian study on the future of warfare.
Starlink is launching a new beta path for ordinary property owners and local operators to turn a single Starlink kit into a small shared-access business for passive income.
Under the Starlink for Communities program, a host installs one dish and router setup in a location with nearby demand: an apartment complex, campground, rural crossroads, or event site. Neighbors or local users can buy short-term passes rather than full individual subscriptions, giving the Starlink provider a potential path to passive income.
Hour, day, and week passes cover one device. A month pass covers up to four. Starlink handles account creation, payments, access controls, and the satellite link itself. The host’s role is mainly placement, power, and basic upkeep, with earnings tied to each paid connection.
Big news! SpaceX is introducing a new @Starlink for Communities program that lets you earn money by providing Starlink internet to your neighbors or people nearby, who can pay for access by the hour, day, week, or month.
Neighbors pay for the access they need, while the person… pic.twitter.com/DtOUs0Ekvt
— Sawyer Merritt (@SawyerMerritt) October 1, 2026
The model echoes the passive-income vision long attached to Tesla’s Robotaxi plans, and it seems like it’s something Musk has hinted toward in the past as he believes AI will make the need to work relatively optional. In both cases, the platform owns the hard parts of matching, billing, and network management, while an individual supplies a physical asset that sits idle much of the time.
A Starlink host’s dish can serve multiple nearby users without each household buying and installing its own terminal. A Tesla owner, under the stated Robotaxi concept, would leave a vehicle enrolled in the fleet during unused hours so the car generates rides while the owner is at work or asleep.
Both arrangements convert under-utilized hardware into a revenue stream. They also let the company scale coverage or capacity without owning every endpoint.
Differences are practical. A Starlink kit is a fixed, relatively low-cost terminal whose main constraint is local congestion and line-of-sight. A Tesla Robotaxi is a mobile, high-value vehicle whose earnings depend on demand density, utilization rates, insurance, cleaning, and charging.
Starlink’s program is already accepting host applications in multiple countries and describes the revenue split as ongoing. Tesla’s owner-network version remains more aspirational.
The company currently operates a limited company-controlled robotaxi service in select areas and has solicited interest from fleet buyers for Cybercab vehicles, while private Full Self-Driving owners have not yet been able to dispatch their own cars for paid rides at scale.
Tesla primes Cybercabs for 4K streaming and high bandwidth gaming with Starlink integration
Starlink is a satellite broadband service operated by SpaceX that uses a constellation of low-Earth-orbit satellites to deliver internet to locations where terrestrial broadband is slow, expensive, or absent. It has grown to millions of subscribers worldwide by selling direct residential, mobile, and enterprise terminals, and have become widely available at a wide array at retail locations like Target and Best Buy.
The Communities program extends that reach by letting hosts resell short bursts of capacity to people nearby, while also providing high-speed internet access to those who are simply around a Starlink user.
Tesla wins over Netflix’s Selling Sunset star, who’s now ditching his Bentley
Elon Musk follows Trump’s lead, says a SpaceX name change is coming
