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Comment by wcoenen | Hacker News Reader

Too bad that they are still comparing crashes per autopilot mile vs crashes per non-autopilot mile without taking road type into account. If autopilot is mostly used on highways then that isn't a good comparison. A comparison between autopilot and non-autopilot for highway miles only would be more interesting.

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Also demographics. All Tesla cars (at least the ones with autopilot) are less than 5 years old, and typically driven by a subset of the national demographic due to their price. But they are comparing crash rates of ALL cars, including 30 year old clunkers with few safety features.

I wonder how the numbers would differ if they were to, for example, only compare to cars of similar years, or filter so the comparison is of the same demographic, or at the very minimum compared to cars of the same class/price.

With all that said, I love what Tesla is doing to advance safety features and technology. But these kinds of numbers leave a bad taste in my mouth.

This article apparantly shows that fatality rates of Tesla are worse than of other luxury car makers: https://medium.com/@MidwesternHedgi/teslas-driver-fatality-r...

I am pro Tesla but I don't get why they don't compare apples to apples. As if Tesla doesn't know this? And if they know then don't try to screw the comparision in your favor so that you seem better then you actually are.

You and wcoenen make some good points. That said, Tesla's safety report is a vast improvement over the highly biased reporting on this issue we have been seeing in the media.

But the safety features that would prevent a collision (lane control, adaptive cruise control, blind spot monitoring) are still not prevalent in mainstream vehicles though.

Seems that most cars' safety packages are built around mitigating a crash - better bumpers, more airbags.

They are quite widespread in cars that are comparably priced with Teslas.

> lane control, adaptive cruise control, blind spot monitoring

Not sure about the US but here in Australia at least these features are available in some very low end cars.

And quite widespread in most cars sold today.

To be fair, these features don't appear to be doing a very good job of preventing collisions for Tesla vehicles either.

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