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Tesla Data Annotators Said They Were Sometimes Told to Ignore Road Signs

Some Tesla annotators told Business Insider they were sometimes instructed to disregard turn-restriction signs in footage. The testimony concerns labeling, not proof that deployed cars ignored signs.

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Some Tesla data annotators told Business Insider they were sometimes instructed to disregard “No Turn on Red” and “No U-Turn” signs while labeling driving footage. One former worker described the rationale as teaching the system to drive more like a person than “a robot that’s just following the rules.” The account concerns how some clips were labeled; it does not establish a company-wide policy or show that Tesla vehicles ignored those signs on the road.

What Tesla workers said about the signs

Business Insider reporter Grace Kay said she spoke with 17 current and former members of Tesla’s data-annotation team. Seven of those workers said annotators were at times told to disregard “No Turn on Red” or “No U-Turn” signs when labeling footage. In that context, disregarding a sign meant not using it to train the system to adhere to that restriction, according to the report. Business Insider’s September 3, 2024 report

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A former worker characterized the approach this way: “It’s a driver-first mentality. I think the idea is we want to train it to drive like a human would, not a robot that’s just following the rules.” That is the worker’s explanation of the rationale, not a statement attributed to Tesla management.

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What the annotation work involved

Business Insider described teams in Buffalo, New York; Palo Alto, California; and Draper, Utah. Their projects could include reviewing short video clips, tracing objects in still images, or working with satellite overlays. The footage, the report said, came from vehicle owners and in-house test drivers and was used in development work for Autopilot and Full Self-Driving. These details describe the outlet’s reporting on the workflow, not an independent audit of Tesla’s systems. Business Insider

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The report said annotators encountered footage from different regions, where traffic rules can vary. That context helps explain why sign labeling matters, but the reporting does not establish how often the disputed instructions occurred, which clips or locations were involved, or how the labels affected a particular model.

What this account does—and does not—establish

  • It establishes an attributed allegation: seven workers told Business Insider they were sometimes told to disregard the two named types of signs during annotation.
  • It does not establish a formal, company-wide policy: the account is worker testimony about a reported practice, not a published policy or independent verification of every team’s instructions.
  • It does not demonstrate on-road behavior: a labeling decision is not proof that a deployed vehicle will ignore a sign. The report did not test vehicles against these signs or document a resulting maneuver.
  • Tesla’s response in the original report was limited: Business Insider said it contacted Tesla, Elon Musk, and his legal team but received no response before publication. That is not an admission or denial, and it does not establish whether Tesla commented later.

Futurism’s September 10, 2024 account relayed an essay dictated to Business Insider by an unnamed current worker. The worker was quoted as saying, “There were some times we were told to ignore ‘No Turn on Red’ or ‘No U-Turn’ signs,” and that the general response was along the lines of “Mind your business and your pay grade.” The secondary account provides another attributed version of the allegation, not independent identification of the worker. Futurism’s account

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Driver instructions are separate from the labeling allegation

Tesla’s 2024+ Model 3 Owner’s Manual says that Autosteer requires active driver attention: “Your hands must be on the steering wheel at all times while Autosteer is engaged, and you must monitor your surroundings, the road, and other road users.” It also says not to rely on Traffic-Aware Cruise Control to determine an appropriate driving speed and recommends staying within posted speed limits. Those are driver-facing instructions; they neither confirm nor refute what workers said about labeling. The manual is specific to the 2024+ Model 3, and wording or feature availability may differ by market and configuration. Tesla 2024+ Model 3 Owner’s Manual

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Why labeling is part of the development story

Human labelers mark objects and events in images or video so machine-learning systems can be trained on examples. Reuters reported that Tesla brought data-labeling work in-house after dissatisfaction with contracted labeling. In an August 2021 presentation, then-Tesla AI senior director Andrej Karpathy said the organization had grown to “more than a 1,000-person data labeling (organization)” working closely with engineers. That is a historical figure from 2021, not a current headcount. Reuters also quoted Karpathy criticizing the quality of earlier third-party datasets. Reuters’ 2021 report

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That history illustrates why labeling decisions can matter during development, but it does not show that any particular label determines a vehicle’s final behavior. The worker account and the 2021 workforce figure are distinct pieces of reporting from different years.

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Broader safety context is not proof of this allegation

In 2023, the Associated Press reported that a two-year NHTSA investigation led to Tesla’s December 2023 recall response concerning driver-attention safeguards. AP said that since 2016 NHTSA had sent investigators to at least 35 crashes in which Teslas suspected of operating with a partially automated system hit parked emergency vehicles, motorcyclists, or crossing tractor-trailers, causing 17 deaths. Those figures are AP’s account of the investigation’s historical scope; they concern a broader safety context and do not substantiate the specific road-sign labeling allegation. Associated Press, December 2023

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A 2023 preprint by Sina Nordhoff and Joost De Winter summarized interviews with 103 Tesla Autopilot and FSD Beta users. Its model describes anticipated failures, unwanted behavior—including erratic steering or running red lights—and environments users considered unsuitable for automation as reasons for disengaging. It is evidence about interviewed users’ experiences and concerns, not a test of vehicle performance or validation of the sign-labeling account. Nordhoff and De Winter, 2023 preprint abstract

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