https://www.tesla.com/VehicleSafetyReport
This report does not include fatalities, which seems to be the key point in question. Unless the above report has some bias or is false, Teslas in autopilot appear 10 times safer than the US average.
Is there public data on deaths reported by Tesla?
And otherwise, if the stats say it is safer, why is there any debate at all?
- It is safe to assume that the vast majority of autopilot miles are on highways (although Tesla don't release this information).
- By far the safest roads per mile driven are highways.
- Autopilot will engage least during the most dangerous conditions (heavy rain, snow, fog, nighttime).
Welcome to Tesla.
The report measures accidents in FSD mode. Qualifiers to FSD mode: the conditions, weather, road, location, traffic all have to meet a certain quality threshold before the system will be enabled (or not disable itself). Compare Sunnyvale on a clear spring day to Pittsburgh December nights.
There's no qualifier to the "comparison": all drivers, all conditions, all weather, all roads, all location, all traffic.
It's not remotely comparable, and Tesla's data people are not that stupid, so it's willfully misleading.
> This report does not include fatalities
It also doesn't consider any incident where there was not airbag deployment to be an accident. Sounds potentially reasonable until you consider:
- first gen airbag systems were primitive: collision exceeds threshold, deploy. Currently, vehicle safety systems consider duration of impact, speeds, G-forces, amount of intrusion, angle of collision, and a multitude of other factors before deciding what, if any, systems to fire (seatbelt tensioners, airbags, etc.) So hit something at 30mph with the right variables? Tesla: "this is not an accident".
- Tesla also does not consider "incident was so catastrophic that airbags COULD NOT deploy*" to be an accident, because "airbags didn't deploy". This umbrella could also include egregious, "systems failed to deploy for any reason up to and including poor assembly line quality control", as also not an accident and also "not counted".
> Is there public data on deaths reported by Tesla?
They do not.
They also refuse to give the public much of any data beyond these carefully curated numbers. Hell, NHTSA/NTSB also mostly have to drag heavily redacted data kicking and screaming out of Tesla's hands.
IMO, the challenge for NHTSA is that they can get tremendous detail from Tesla but not from other makes. This will make it very difficult for them to get a solid baseline for collisions due to glare in non-FSD equipped vehicles.