The statistics also includes all the cases where drivers are not paying attention as they should, and it's still safer than the average car (at least according to Tesla).
This is Tesla's big lie.
In all their marketing, Tesla is comparing crash rates of their passenger cars to ALL vehicles, including trucks and motorcycles, which have higher fatality rates. Motorcycles are about 10x-50x more dangerous than cars.
Not only that, they aren't controlling for variances in driver demographics - younger and old people have higher accident rates than middle-aged Tesla drivers - as well as environmental factors - rural roads have higher fatalities than highways. Never-mind the obvious "accidents in cars with Autopilot" vs "accidents in cars with Autopilot on".
If you do a proper comparison, Tesla's Autopilot is probably 100x more fatal than other cars. It's a god-dammed death trap.
And remember, there are several extremely normal cars with ZERO fatalities: https://www.nbcnews.com/business/autos/record-9-models-have-...
This is not a problem that will be solved without fundamental infrastructure changes in the roads themselves. Anyone that believes in self-driving cars should never be employed, since they don't know what they're talking about.
However, I don't see the evidence for the claim that "Tesla's Autopilot is probably 100x more fatal than other cars". The flip side of the complaint that Tesla hasn't released information to know how safe Autopilot really is, is that we don't know how unsafe it really is either. If this is merely to say "I think Autopilot is likely very unsafe" then just say so, rather than giving a faux numerical value.
As for the claim that self-driving cars can't work without "fundamental infrastructure changes" and everybody working on self-driving cars should be fired, I think you're talking way beyond your domain of expertise.
The truth is somewhere in between Tesla's marketing and your wildly absurd 100x more fatal claim, but its much closer to Tesla than you.
Tesla's statistics (i.e. real numbers, but context means everything) do involve a whole whack of unrelated comparisons (buses, 18-wheelers, motorcycles) that all server to skew the stats in various ways, we can ignore them claiming to be slightly safer than regular cars.
However comparing more like to like, IIHS numbers for passenger cars driver deaths on highways puts Tesla at 3.2x more likely than all other cars to be involved in a fatal crash (1 death/428,000,000 miles driven vs tesla's 1 death/133,000,000 miles driven).
Of course this too is an unfair comparison. A 133hp econobox/prius vs a sports car in terms of performance is considered equal in that comparison. If one was really interested in accuracy, a comparison of high power AWD cars in similar price ranges driven on the same roads by the same demographics would be needed.
So by even standards clearly biased against Tesla, they are no where near 100x more fatal than other cars. Tesla's own numbers claim autopilot reduces accidents, and supposedly NHS numbers back them up.
Its important and critical to not believe marketing hype and lazy statistics. If you want people to take you seriously, countering hype and bad stats with equal or worse hype and worse counter stats is not the way to do it.
I do believe "it's still safer than the average car" because there's not a big tank of explosive - I'm most curious to hear what caused such a massive fire in this crash. But you're talking about the autopilot and it's statistically incorrect to say it's safer than the average car. It's merely safer than a driver alone - this should be no surprise as you'll find that cars with backup cameras and alarms don't hit have as many accidents while in reverse as cars without them.
How does a Tesla get such good range? There's still a lot of energy in those batteries, and damaging them is far easier to cause a fire than leaking fuel --- the former can self-ignite just from dissipating its own energy into an internal short, while the latter needs an ignition source. In addition, the batteries are under the entire vehicle and thus more likely to be damaged; a fuel tank has a smaller area and is concentrated in one place.
It is extremely rare for fuel tanks to explode in a crash.
So far, experiential evidence with Tesla seems to be showing a lower than average risk of fires, though the breadth and nature of the battery leads to challenges in managing the fire itself.
All cases that I'm aware of proceeded at a slow enough pace to allow evacuation of the vehicle.
How often does a damaged and leaking fuel tank start a fire?
How often does a lithium battery that has been structurally compromised start a fire?
Fire safety is a major negative for lithium batteries. That much electrical energy in that form factor can only be so safe.