Senators press NHTSA to review Tesla's self-published FSD crash data

Edward Markey and Richard Blumenthal want the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to determine whether Tesla’s self-published crash statistics for Full Self-Driving can stand up to formal review. The Massachusetts and Connecticut senators asked the agency to answer by July 7 whether it has evaluated Tesla’s safety claims or requested the underlying crash data.

Their push turns a dispute over methodology into a broader test of federal oversight. Reuters reported that Elon Musk and other Tesla leaders have repeatedly cited figures they say show FSD is up to 10 times safer than human drivers, but researchers said the comparison is distorted because Tesla counts crashes involving airbag deployments in FSD-piloted vehicles while benchmarking them against a wider U.S. crash rate that includes many less severe incidents.

That mismatch matters because the comparison also pits Tesla’s newer fleet against a much older average U.S. vehicle fleet. Reuters said Tesla has presented similar safety data to European regulators as it seeks approval for FSD in the European Union, raising the possibility that the same company-curated numbers are being used to win regulatory acceptance on both sides of the Atlantic.

The senators argued that current federal reporting rules leave regulators unable to tell whether public safety claims bear any relation to reality. Tesla did not immediately comment, and NHTSA also did not respond. If the agency decides to dig deeper, the outcome could affect how advanced driver-assistance systems are marketed, monitored and approved, at a moment when competition in autonomous technology is intensifying and regulators are watching safety claims more closely.

The latest letter follows a September 29, 2025 appeal from Markey and Blumenthal asking NHTSA to investigate Tesla FSD failures at railroad crossings. In that letter, the senators said drivers had reported incidents over the previous year in which FSD-equipped vehicles failed to recognize or properly respond to rail crossings, warning that such failures could lead to catastrophic multi-fatality collisions. They also noted that NHTSA had opened a separate probe in October 2024 into FSD performance in reduced-visibility conditions.

After that probe, Tesla renamed the system Full Self-Driving (Supervised) and added fine print stating that it is not autonomous. Now the company’s safety narrative is under sharper scrutiny, with lawmakers pressing NHTSA to verify the data behind one of Tesla’s most important long-term claims.