A report circulating this week is drawing renewed attention to Tesla's safety claims around Full Self-Driving — and one prominent voice in the EV space thinks it's long overdue. Electrek's Fred Lambert flagged the report on X, pointing to two distinct concerns: the psychological toll on Tesla's data labelers, and what he describes as Tesla making false claims about FSD safety data.
Lambert's first point centers on the human experience of training AI at scale. Data labelers — the workers who review and annotate footage to teach FSD how to handle edge cases — are, by the nature of the job, exposed to a constant stream of near-misses, crashes, and dangerous scenarios. Lambert notes he's unsurprised that workers in that role would develop a negative view of FSD's readiness. When your entire workday consists of watching the system fail, your confidence in it is unlikely to be high.
But Lambert flags a second issue as the more substantively important one: the report's scrutiny of how Tesla presents its safety statistics. Tesla has long cited FSD miles-per-intervention and crash-rate comparisons to argue the system is safer than human driving. Critics have pushed back on the methodology behind those figures — questioning whether the comparison baselines are fair, whether interventions are consistently defined, and whether the data is independently verifiable. Lambert's framing suggests the report takes those challenges seriously rather than treating them as fringe skepticism.
For Tesla owners who rely on FSD or are considering upgrading, the core question remains unresolved: how confident should you be in the safety numbers Tesla publishes? Independent verification of autonomous driving data is notoriously difficult, and regulatory frameworks for validating those claims are still catching up to the technology. Until a credible third-party audit framework exists, the debate over what Tesla's safety statistics actually prove is unlikely to settle. For our broader coverage of FSD and autonomous driving developments, see our FSD coverage.
Marcus covers Tesla's software releases, FSD rollouts, and OTA changes. Background in automotive engineering. Based in Austin.
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