For years, tech entrepreneurs have been preaching that self-driving cars will soon deliver us from our hellscape of vehicular crashes and horrible, fiery deaths.
Among the biggest advocates for the safety of autonomous vehicles has been Elon Musk, whose promises of a fully self-driving Tesla have been wearing on for a decade.
Despite having provided no proof that Teslas can operate at a level required for "autonomous driving," the tech mogul's robotaxi service is mere days away from going live in Austin.
Already, driverless Model Ys are testing out Austin-area roads full of living, breathing humans — which is why it's all the more horrifying that a self-driving Tesla was responsible for the brutal death of a Phoenix-area grandmother.
The fatal incident happened in 2023, and was the first pedestrian death attributed to a Tesla's self-driving software.
Bloomberg recently released the crash footage, which shows a Tesla screaming down the highway into a blinding Arizona sunset. Moments before the fatality, the vehicle reacts to a man waving it down by veering to the left, though failing to slow down.
The vehicle then adjusts to the right, straight onto the 71-year old woman, who was helping direct traffic after a previous accident shut down the highway ahead. Though there was a driver in the Tesla at the time who should have intervened, it's not known whether they were implicated in the woman's death.
Though all carmakers are required to report any incident where self-driving software is involved, Tesla took seven months to submit the crash details to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA.)
The fatality brought about a federal investigation into Tesla's "Full Self-Driving" software, which in spite of its name requires constant supervision, and has been found responsible for multiple crashes in the past few years.
One of the major issues with Tesla's self-driving software is the sensor it uses to detect other objects. Instead of a LiDAR system like Tesla's ascendant competitor Waymo, Musk has chosen to barrel ahead with visual cameras alone — even as evidence grows suggesting some major safety flaws with that strategy.
Meanwhile, Tesla is actively hiring engineers to work on "sensor cleaning systems," presumably to patch over the sensor issues that led to a combined 467 crashes by 2024.
None of it bodes well for the company's Austin takeover, which Tesla's own internal documents anticipate will be a disaster.
Bryant Walker Smith, a lawyer and transportation engineer, told Bloomberg that "they are claiming they will be imminently able to do something — true automated driving — that all evidence suggests they still can’t do safely."
And everyone on the roads will be a test subject.
More on self-driving cars: Watch in Horror as Cybertruck Driver Plays "Grand Theft Auto" While Screaming Down Highway on Self-Driving Mode
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