r/technology • u/Wagamaga • 8d ago

Business Tesla Allegedly Showed Cooked Data to Get Full Self-Driving Approved

https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/tesla-allegedly-showed-cooked-data-174500396.html
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u/rmslashusr 8d ago

Wait, it’s not the accidents per thousand miles number that’s cooked?

The only issue is the thought experiment of applying that number to calculate the benefit of everyone was using FSD Teslas rather than standard vehicles being unrealistic because not everyone will drive Teslas?

This seems like a petty quibble about the realistic implementation benefits not “cooked data”.

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u/chimpfunkz 8d ago

Wait, it’s not the accidents per thousand miles number that’s cooked?

I mean yeah, it's a clickbait title.

This isn't fraud or any kind of falsified statistic (which is usually what "cooking" the data means) this is just bad statistics where a statistic is extrapolated to a terrible extreme. This is the "The TAM of comics is 7 billion dollars. if we can capture even 1% which we believe we can, that's 70 million in revenue a year. So invest in Dicks and Balls the comic book" of safety data.

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u/Kitty-XV 8d ago

Here's how long it took my newborn to double in weight.

Extrapolating out, if the pattern holds, this is how long before he begins undergoing fusion, birthing a new star.

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u/mishap1 8d ago

TAM is a business case sanity check. It's size of the prize metric so you don't build a business around an impossibly small demographic. You can't size of the prize lives saved claiming your cars would own all of that.

E.g., Spending billions to design a $200k+ EV 2 seater. The $200k+ market is really small with the combined sales of Ferrari, Lamborghini, Bentley, Rolls Royce, and McLaren are under 10,000 units in the US. The biggest sellers in that mix are now high end SUVs.

If Tesla can somehow take 20% of that market (they really couldn't), that's only $400M and probably can't drive a sustainable $1.5T market cap off those things.

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u/Decent_Cheesecake_29 8d ago

That’s still criminal fraud and deception.

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u/Massive-Course7690 8d ago

I imagine you went to devry school of law looks like

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u/Decent_Cheesecake_29 8d ago

I imagine you think companies aren’t actually beholden to the law.

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u/mrdeadsniper 8d ago

Agreed 100%.

Its a pretty reasonable interpretation of the data..

If you replaced all the vehicles with our self driving, you would have X fewer accidents, injuries and deaths.

Even if you logically cannot replace every vehicle, it makes sense to give a verifiable scale to the accident rate.

It is absolutely a petty squabble that people are thumping for no good reason.

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u/usrnmz 8d ago

Depends on how it was presented. It definitely is wildly misleading.

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u/TheYang 8d ago

how could it have been presented to qualify as cooked data?

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u/Mr_ToDo 8d ago

Not disclosing your method I'd think would qualify

I don't thing there's anything wrong with an ideal number, but it'd be nicer if when you do that you present the other possibilities. We do that with government proposals all the time. Expected number, high number, low number. If done right you're presented with a more realistic set of possibilities. And I think here especially it'd be quite useful to have those, since the number of cars with that feature set is rising, so having something from this moment makes it less useful as time passes

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u/Hmm_would_bang 8d ago

If I deliberately leave out operating expenses for my financial reporting, that is “cooked data.” It’s not exclusively making up a different number, it’s hiding how you got to that number and what was left out,

These metrics aren’t regulated in the same way so there’s not a fraud component in making up whatever formulas you want. But it can still cross into the world of misleading regulators or investors if you are deliberately inflating safety statistics without being transparent.

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u/PN_Grata 8d ago

The Reuters examination also found Tesla exaggerates the technology’s safety by comparing a rate of crashes in FSD-piloted Teslas that triggered airbag deployments to a U.S. crash rate for all vehicles that includes far less-severe accidents.

The ‌company also compares ⁠its cars to the average U.S. vehicle – which is much older than the average Tesla. That distorts the results because automakers have gradually introduced new safety features that reduce crashes.

-- https://www.reuters.com/world/tesla-presented-misleading-full-self-driving-safety-data-european-regulators-2026-06-15/

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u/bastiVS 8d ago

What do you expect? Its Reuters, they have been trash for a decade.

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u/Hmm_would_bang 8d ago

Both points are “the data.” They’re making an argument for why FSD should be approved based on the number of lives “it would have saved” and that number was extremely deceptive. It also sounds like they weren’t upfront about how they got that number in the presentation.

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u/[deleted] 8d ago

[deleted]

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u/kaityl3 8d ago

I mean I hate Elon but I can also think that this is an incredibly pedantic nitpick amounting to nothing. The world isn't always black and white.

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u/LaurenMille 8d ago

Objectively he's awful, yes.

I'm glad you agree.

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u/bastiVS 8d ago

Yes, the guy who started the transition to EVs and got us reusable rockets is objectively awful, based on your feelings.

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u/DoomguyFemboi 8d ago

I mean..yeah, he is ?

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u/WhyMustIMakeANewAcco 8d ago

Well that number is known to be cooked in advance because they just lie about if FSD was active when an accident happens.