July 2026 was the worst month on record for Tesla driver-assist crashes. Tesla reported 236 of them to federal regulators, the most it has ever filed in a single month.

Four of those crashes killed someone. In every one, Tesla’s own data says Autopilot or “Full Self-Driving” was engaged, and in every one, the public was never told the system was involved. This is the latest from our ongoing investigation matching Tesla’s redacted NHTSA reports to real, named crashes.

Elon Musk is once again promoting the misuse of Tesla’s “Full Self-Driving” (FSD), this time by amplifying a video of a 98-year-old man who openly admits he has stopped watching the road.

The clip is charming. It’s also a textbook example of the exact driver behavior Tesla’s lawyers are fighting in a growing pile of crash lawsuits.

A 2024 Tesla Model Y ran off Interstate 35 in rural Missouri, struck a guardrail, and killed its driver, a 64-year-old woman from Raymore. Troopers reported a single-vehicle wreck and said the car “went off the road.”

What they didn’t say, and likely didn’t know, is that Tesla’s own report to federal regulators says the car’s driver-assist system was engaged. This is part of an ongoing Electrek investigation matching reported crashes to Tesla’s redacted NHTSA data.

A US congressman is demanding the Department of Transportation explain what it’s doing about Tesla’s Autopilot and Full Self-Driving after an NBC News investigation surfaced dozens of videos of drivers apparently asleep at the wheel.

Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi gave Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy until September 30 to answer five questions about the systems, which Tesla itself says “require active driver supervision and are not autonomous driving systems.”

A 2021 Tesla Model Y left an Alabama highway, hit two trees, and caught fire, killing its driver, 29-year-old Kayleigh Page. Her 7-month-old daughter was pulled from the burning car by a stranger who saw it happen.

Troopers reported it as a single-vehicle wreck. What they didn’t say, and likely didn’t know, is that Tesla’s own data shows the car’s driver-assist system was engaged. This is part of an ongoing Electrek investigation matching reported crashes to Tesla’s redacted NHTSA data.

A Tesla Model 3 ran a stop sign in Buena Vista Township, New Jersey, and hit a Honda Civic turning left through the intersection. The Civic’s driver, 82-year-old Stephen Field, was killed.

Police reported it as a car that failed to stop. What no one reported is that Tesla’s own data says the car’s driver-assist system was engaged. This is part of an ongoing Electrek investigation matching reported crashes to Tesla’s redacted NHTSA data.

Tesla is now asking businesses whether they’d like to buy and operate their own fleets of Cybercab robotaxis on its network. It’s the same pitch Elon Musk has been making since 2019: buy the cars, put them to work, and earn money while you sleep.

There’s one problem with it. And it never happened, and you shouldn’t fall for it now. If running a fleet of Cybercabs were actually profitable, Tesla wouldn’t sell you a single one.

Tesla is rolling out a new version of its Full Self-Driving (Supervised) software that can take control of your car to avoid a crash, even when you’re driving manually.

The automaker announced the feature, part of FSD Supervised v14.3.9, in a post from its AI team early Friday.

Tesla’s Cybercab is already under federal investigation. NHTSA opened an audit into how Tesla certified the vehicle the same day the company started putting passengers in it in Austin.

The probe targets the exact thing that makes the Cybercab unusual: it has no steering wheel, no pedals, and no mirrors, and Tesla certified it as road-legal anyway.

A Tesla Model X struck and killed a motorcyclist at an intersection in Moraine last year and the crash went mostly unnoticed.

But Tesla’s own report to federal regulators says the vehicle was a Model X with its driver-assist system, Autopilot or Full Self-Driving (Tesla hides which one) engaged. This is part of an ongoing Electrek investigation matching reported crashes to Tesla’s redacted NHTSA data — and it’s the clearest example yet of how completely these crashes can vanish from the public record.

Tesla has settled a wrongful death lawsuit over a 2023 crash in which a Model S on Autopilot slammed into a parked fire truck, killing the driver and seriously injuring his brother.

The confidential settlement, filed in California federal court, lets Tesla avoid a jury trial that would have put Elon Musk’s own Autopilot claims in front of jurors.

San Francisco 49ers head coach Kyle Shanahan crashed his Tesla Model S on July 14 while the car was running on Autopilot. He was reaching for a phone that had dropped out of reach, and he took his eyes off the road.

The crash left him with a concussion, a broken nose, three broken ribs, a broken left hand, and 40 stitches over his right eye. And to his credit, he isn’t blaming the car.

Sometime next week, NASA's newest rover on Mars, Perseverance, will set a record for the most distance driven by any vehicle on another world.

The automobile-sized rover, which landed on Mars in February 2021, will traverse beyond 45.16 km (28.06 miles) across the Martian surface. In doing so it will break the previous distance record held by the long-lived Opportunity rover, which ceased communications with NASA in 2018.

So how did Perseverance reach this record-setting distance in just a third of the time?

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Sometime next week, NASA's newest rover on Mars, Perseverance, will set a record for the most distance driven by any vehicle on another world.

The automobile-sized rover, which landed on Mars in February 2021, will traverse beyond 45.16 km (28.06 miles) across the Martian surface. In doing so it will break the previous distance record held by the long-lived Opportunity rover, which ceased communications with NASA in 2018.

So how did Perseverance reach this record-setting distance in just a third of the time?

Read full article

Comments

A police department in Parker, Colorado, pulled over a Tesla going 64 mph in a 45 mph zone whose driver insisted they weren’t responsible, because the car was running “Full Self-Driving.”

Of course, Tesla will never take responsibility for that incident, but the frustrating part is that Tesla already has the solution and yet it refuses to implement it.

Waymo co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov laid out the clearest technical case yet for why cameras alone can’t take a self-driving system to full autonomy, arguing that “weak sensing” hits a safety ceiling long before it reaches superhuman performance.

He never said the word Tesla. But camera-only is Tesla’s entire bet, and this was a direct shot at it.

A growing number of Tesla owners running the new Full Self-Driving v14 “Lite” build on Hardware 3 (HW3) vehicles are reporting Autopilot computer overheating alerts — and, in some cases, outright computer failures.

The reports have stacked up in the two weeks since Tesla pushed v14 Lite to wide release, and four owners have contacted Electrek directly about the same problem.

A former Tesla manager who ran the company’s “Full Self-Driving” test fleet in Houston says the operation was so understaffed that its cars became “rolling hazards on public streets,” according to a lawsuit.

The manager, Javier Medrano, filed the wrongful-termination complaint in Houston federal court, and its contents were reported this week. He oversaw the fleet before Tesla launched its driverless “Robotaxi” in the city.

Elon Musk says Tesla expects to have self-driving working on the Tesla Semi “probably around the end of this year or early next year.”

Going by Tesla’s record on self-driving deadlines, it is: their jobs are safe for a long time.

Elon Musk was asked directly on Tesla’s Q2 2026 earnings call whether the company still plans to upgrade Hardware 3 (HW3) cars so they can run its latest “Full Self-Driving” software. His answer made one thing clear: Tesla still has no concrete plan.

Instead of committing to a fix, Musk floated a grab-bag of options and timelines — none of them firm — for the millions of vehicles Tesla sold with the promise that they had “all the hardware necessary” for self-driving.