Founder of The Dawn Project Dan O’Dowd discussed NHTSA launching an investigation into Tesla reporting crashes involving its self-driving software to the regulator months after they occurred.
Dan’s comments were published in Business Insider and USA Today on August 21, 2025.
Dan commented: “Elon Musk and Tesla’s contempt for regulators is appalling. Tesla goes to great lengths to conceal the truth about crashes involving Full Self-Driving and Autopilot because it knows its self-driving software is dangerous. Tesla should focus on fixing the litany of safety-critical bugs plaguing Full Self-Driving rather than trying to conceal the crashes its self-driving software causes from NHTSA.
“NHTSA has already recorded at least 51 fatalities and 2,308 crashes involving Tesla’s self-driving software. Tesla demands that NHTSA redacts details about these crashes, claiming that they contain confidential business information. To make matters worse, Tesla doesn’t even know the true number of Full Self-Driving and Autopilot crashes. NHTSA states that: “Tesla is not aware of every crash involving Autopilot even for severe crashes because of gaps in telematic reporting”.
“Tesla has a long history of cherry picking data to deceive safety conscious consumers into wrongly believing that its self-driving software is ten times safer than driving manually. Tesla’s Vehicle Safety Report only counts Autopilot crashes involving airbag deployments, and compares it to the US average. However, the US average includes all police reported accidents, not just those with airbag deployments.
“Only 18% of police reported crashes involve airbag deployments, according to data from NHTSA. This means that Tesla hasn’t been counting at least four out of five crashes involving its self-driving software.”