TL;DR
A Tesla crashed into a garage door in Redmond, WA. The driver blames the autopilot. The police are investigating. No injuries. Tesla has not commented.
A Tesla driver in Redmond, Washington, claims the car’s self-driving mode didn’t work properly before It veered into a residential garage door on Monday. The car broke the door and ended up trapped inside the garage. Police responded around 11 a.m. and are investigating.
No injuries were reported. There were no signs of deterioration. The driver blamed Tesla’s driving software, although the local King 5 News report referred to it as the “autopilot system”without specifying whether the vehicle was in autopilot or in the more advanced Full Self-Driving (Supervised).
The distinction matters. Autopilot handles basic lane keeping and cruise control. Full autonomous (supervised) driving can navigate city streets, but the name is misleading: it is not capable of driving itself and requires constant attention from the driver. Former Tesla employees who trained autonomous AI said they would not ride in a car with FSD.and one told Reuters they wouldn’t “if you paid me“
The Redmond accident is a unique incident, but it adds to a pattern. Tesla robotaxis in Austin crash every 57,000 miles, four times worse than the human average. NHTSA has stepped up an investigation into 3.2 million FSD-equipped Tesla vehicles after crashes in which the system failed to detect reflections, fog and airborne debris. FSD-powered cars have gotten into the path of oncoming trains frequently enough to trigger a targeted federal investigation.
Tesla has not commented on the Redmond accident. The company rarely comments on individual incidents, instead pointing to aggregate safety data that it says shows Autopilot vehicles are involved in fewer crashes per mile than the national average. Critics point out that the comparison is misleading because Autopilot is primarily used on highways, where accident rates are already lower.
For the homeowner, the math is simpler: A garage door is destroyed and a car is sitting in your living space. The “litmus test” of Tesla’s FSD It was supposed to prove that the technology works at scale. One more photo of a Tesla wedged into a structure it was not supposed to fit into does the opposite.
