Ex-Tesla Employees Distrust FSD, Some Refuse to Ride Robotaxis

On May 28, Reuters published a special report citing interviews with ten former Tesla employees, including nine former data labelers and one former Autopilot engineer. They expressed widespread distrust in the safety of Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (FSD) system. Seven of the data labelers explicitly stated they would not ride in a Tesla vehicle with FSD enabled. One former employee said, “We’ve all seen FSD fail,” and responded to Elon Musk’s claim that Tesla has already achieved “safe, unsupervised” driving by saying, “Don’t believe Elon—ever.” Another former employee bluntly stated they wouldn’t ride in a Tesla Robotaxi even if paid to do so. These former employees had previously reviewed vast amounts of FSD driving footage used to train the software to avoid repeating mistakes. They revealed that during their work, they frequently observed FSD-equipped vehicles speeding, yet engineers and management appeared not to treat such issues as high-priority concerns. Their remarks come amid ongoing widespread public skepticism about the safety of FSD on public roads.