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Some of them, at least.
According to Reuters, the news organization interviewed a former self-driving engineer at Tesla and nine former data labelers, and they did not offer a singing endorsement of Tesla’s “Full Self Driving” (FSD) system. Reuters also talked with eleven independent traffic safety researchers for the piece.
“In a Utah office, hundreds of Tesla workers scrutinize video collected by vehicles using the automaker’s Full Self-Driving (FSD) feature. Some clips show the cars hitting cats, dogs or deer, along with more-routine accidents. Sometimes, they don’t brake before impact,” the piece starts out. “Often, they speed. Occasionally, the workers see near-misses of children playing in the street.” It doesn’t get much better from there.
The former staff countered one of the most popular claims from Tesla fans and Elon Musk — that true unsupervised FSD could just be turned on broadly, across the US at least, soon and every Tesla driver with FSD could do other things while the cars drove themselves. Counter to that, the former staff said they worked for hours training FSD on specific routes to make the system good enough to show off for public events, and that deploying FSD broadly without all of that focused work could not be done — that the system simply wasn’t good enough. “The staffers said these labor-intensive safeguards are impossible to deploy on a broad scale,” as Reuters summarized it. “Those efforts, which haven’t been previously reported, undermine Musk’s long-stated claim that Tesla’s self-driving technology will soon work anywhere globally and doesn’t require the same laborious local mapping of roads and hazards employed by rivals.”
