Tesla Employees Say They Wouldn’t Trust FSD to Drive Them

A bombshell Reuters investigation reveals a stark disconnect between Tesla’s public-facing autonomous driving hype and the reality inside its Full Self-Driving (FSD) program. Current and former Tesla employees—including data labelers, engineers, researchers, and safety experts—told Reuters that the system routinely struggles with basic scenarios like school buses, emergency vehicles, construction zones, pedestrians, and speed control. Several workers admitted they personally wouldn’t trust FSD to drive them around.

The investigation also uncovers an internal “trauma team” dedicated to reviewing near-misses involving pedestrians, including children, as well as footage of FSD-equipped Teslas striking animals, missing hazards, or requiring last-second human intervention. Tesla has long claimed FSD is dramatically safer than human drivers, but Reuters found major flaws in its safety statistics. The company allegedly compares crashes involving airbag deployments in FSD-equipped vehicles against broader federal crash datasets that include less severe incidents.

Researchers also criticized Tesla for comparing new FSD-equipped Teslas against the entire U.S. vehicle fleet, which averages over a decade old. Additionally, Tesla reportedly only counts crashes if they occur within five seconds of FSD disengagement, despite federal standards using a 30-second window. These methodological choices may paint an overly optimistic picture of FSD’s safety.

The report also highlights Tesla’s reliance on heavily mapped robotaxi zones and extensive route preparation in cities like Austin and California, where teams annotate roads, curbs, pickup zones, signs, and tricky traffic situations to ensure smooth operation. This contradicts Elon Musk’s past criticism of rivals like Waymo for depending on geofenced areas, with Musk stating in 2019, “If you need a geofence area you don’t have real self driving!” The investigation exposes a duality at the heart of Tesla’s autonomy push: internally, the company appears acutely aware of the immense challenges, with employees meticulously reviewing failures and retraining scenarios, while externally, leadership continues to frame autonomy as perpetually just months away.