Elon Musk publicly admitted Tesla's robotaxis still can't reliably spot pets on dark roads — and the tech press treated his honesty like a scandal, while the fact that two people died in nighttime crashes involving Tesla vehicles, with the details redacted from public view, barely registered.
This is the playbook: punish transparency from builders, look the other way when the regulatory state fails. Musk described the technical challenge as avoiding "grey kittens on grey tarmac" — a straightforward acknowledgment that camera-based systems need light and contrast. Meanwhile, two Tesla Model 3s stopped dead in American traffic lanes last October in the dark and were hit from behind in fatal crashes. Tesla redacted the crash narratives and software versions as confidential business information, according to TNW. Which system was running has never been established. That's the real scandal — not an honest engineer talking about kittens.
What Musk Actually Said
Musk said Friday that Tesla's main focus is solving the problem of not running over pets that blend into the road at night. "Literally trying to avoid grey kittens on grey tarmac in the dark," he said, as Electrek reported. Austin's robotaxi service, which launched in June 2025 running 6am to midnight, now operates until 11pm — shorter than at launch. The fleet is down to roughly 17 vehicles running without safety monitors.
The Lidar Debate
Tesla has pursued a camera-only approach, dropping radar in 2021 and ultrasonic sensors in 2022. Musk called lidar a "fool's errand" in 2019, a "seductive local maximum" in 2022, and argued last August that lidar and radar reduce safety through sensor contention. Waymo takes the opposite approach: its sixth-generation cars carry 13 cameras, four lidars, and six radars, with roughly 4,000 driverless vehicles running around the clock.
Digital Trends framed Musk's admission as evidence Tesla has "more to prove" before robotaxis can run all night. TNW reported the fatal crashes and redacted data. Guess which angle the establishment prefers.
The Regulatory State Steps In
The EU's Technical Committee on Motor Vehicles votes October 6 on bloc-wide approval of FSD Supervised, needing 55% of member states representing 65% of the population. Six countries already cleared it through mutual recognition of the Dutch approval. Stateside, New Jersey has a bill that would require two sensing modalities beyond cameras — a mandate that could lock in certain hardware approaches by law rather than let the market and engineers sort it out. The European system under review is Level 2, where the driver stays liable. Same cameras, different continent, more bureaucrats.
Musk told the truth about a hard engineering problem. Two people died in dark-road crashes and the public still doesn't know what system was running — because regulators let Tesla redact the answer. The question isn't whether camera-only can see in the dark. It's who the press holds accountable and who it lets off the hook.
