TL;DR
A Tesla crashed through a garage door in Redmond, WA. The driver blames Autopilot. Police are investigating. No injuries. Tesla hasn’t commented.
A Tesla driver in Redmond, Washington, claims the car’s self-driving mode malfunctioned before it swerved into a residential garage door on Monday. The car smashed the door open and ended up lodged inside the garage. Police responded around 11 AM and are investigating.
No injuries were reported. There were no indications of impairment. The driver blamed Tesla’s driving software, though local reporting from King 5 News referred to it as the “autopilot system” without specifying whether the vehicle was running Autopilot or the more advanced Full Self-Driving (Supervised).
The distinction matters. Autopilot handles basic lane-keeping and cruise control. Full Self-Driving (Supervised) can navigate city streets, but the name is misleading: it is not capable of fully driving itself and requires constant driver attention. Former Tesla employees who trained the self-driving AI have said they would not ride in a car running FSD, with one telling Reuters they would not do it “if you f**king paid me.”
The Redmond crash is a single incident, but it adds to a pattern. Tesla’s Austin robotaxis crash every 57,000 miles, four times worse than the human average. NHTSA has escalated a probe into 3.2 million Tesla vehicles equipped with FSD after crashes where the system failed to detect glare, fog, and airborne debris. Cars running FSD have driven into the path of oncoming trains often enough to trigger a dedicated federal investigation.
Tesla has not commented on the Redmond crash. The company rarely comments on individual incidents, instead pointing to aggregate safety data that it says shows Autopilot-engaged vehicles are involved in fewer crashes per mile than the national average. Critics note that comparison is misleading because Autopilot is primarily used on highways, where crash rates are already lower.
For the homeowner, the math is simpler: a garage door is destroyed and a car is sitting in their living space. Tesla’s FSD “acid test” was supposed to prove the technology works at scale. One more photo of a Tesla wedged in a structure it was not supposed to enter does the opposite.
