Tesla's safety report lacks data and is extremely misleading.
1. Autopilot only works on (or intended to work on) highways. But they are comparing their highway record to all accident records including city driving, where accident rate is far higher than highway driving.
2. They're also comparing with every vehicle in the United States including millions of older vehicles. Modern vehicles are built for higher safety and have a ton of active safety features (emergency braking, collision prevention etc). Older vehicles are much more prone to accidents and that skews the numbers.
The reality is Teslas are no safer than any other vehicles in its class ($40k+). Their safety report is purely marketing spin.
They also include miles driven by previous versions of their software in the “safe miles driven” tally. There’s no guarantee any improvement would not have resulted in more accidents. They should reset the counter on every release.
> The reality is Teslas are no safer than any other vehicles in its class ($40k+).
Would another way of saying this be that they are as safe as other vehicles in that class? And that therefore Autopilot is not more unsafe than driving those other cars?
Do you know many vehicles $40K+ that don't have BLIS and rear/front cross traffic alerts? While a radar-based blind sport alert (one that warns if a car behind is moving too fast to safely merge) is probably irrelevant for the city driving, the cross traffic is extremely useful when pulling out of driveway obstructed by parked cars, I personally have seen several accidents just on my street that could have been prevented with cross traffic detection. I think the expensive models (S/X) still have the front radar so they may have the front alert but I don't think any model ever had the rear radar for the rear cross traffic alert.
I would probably agree, but I also think it’s a case of “need more data”.
We should really compare Autopilot with its competitors like GM’s Super Cruise or Ford’s Blue Cruise, both of which offer more capabilities than Autopilot. That will show if Tesla’s driver assist system is more or less safe than their competitors product.
What capabilities does GM or Ford have that Tesla doesn't? Neither GM nor Ford have rolled out automatic lane changing. Teslas have been doing that since 2019.
The reason GM's Super Cruise got a higher rating by Consumer Reports was because CR didn't even test the capabilities that only Tesla had (such as automatic lane change and taking offramps/onramps). Also, the majority of the evaluation criteria weren't about capabilities. eg: "unresponsive driver", "clear when safe to use", and "keeping the driver engaged".[1]
>
In the 1st quarter, we registered one accident for every 4.19 million miles driven in which drivers had Autopilot engaged. For those driving without Autopilot but with our active safety features, we registered one accident for every 2.05 million miles driven. For those driving without Autopilot and without our active safety features, we registered one accident for every 978 thousand miles driven. By comparison, NHTSA’s most recent data shows that in the United States there is an automobile crash every 484,000 miles.
I think the comparison should be Tesla with/without AI, not Tesla/not-Tesla; so roughly either x2 or x4 depending on what the other active safety features do.
It’s not nothing, but it’s much less than the current sales pitch — and the current sales pitch is itself the problem here, for many legislators.
> we registered one accident for every 4.19 million miles driven in which drivers had Autopilot engaged [...] for those driving without Autopilot but with our active safety features, we registered one accident for every 2.05 million miles driven
This still isn't the correct comparison. Major selection bias with comparing miles with autopilot engaged to miles without it engaged, since autopilot cannot be engaged in all situations.
A better test would be to compare accidents in Tesla vehicles with the autopilot feature enabled (engaged or not) to accidents in Tesla vehicles with the autopilot feature disabled.
As was stated elsewhere, most accidents happen in city driving where autopilot cannot be activated so the with/without AI is meaningless. We need to figure out when the AI could have been activated but wasn't, if you do that then you are correct.
On the contrary to your overall point: The fatal crash rate per miles driven is almost 2 times higher in rural areas than urban areas. Urban areas may have more accidents, but the speeds are likely lower (fender benders).
Tesla's vehicles are almost 10X safer than the average vehicle. Whether their autopilot system is contributing positively or negatively to that safety record is unclear.
The real test of this would be: of all Tesla vehicles, are the ones with autopilot enabled statistically safer or less safe than the ones without autopilot enabled?
https://www.tesla.com/en_CA/VehicleSafetyReport