In 2017, the feds said Tesla Autopilot cut crashes 40%–that was bogus
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
"To compute a crash rate, you take the number of crashes and divide it by the number of miles traveled. NHTSA did this calculation twice—once for miles traveled before the Autosteer upgrade, and again for miles traveled afterward. NHTSA found that crashes were more common before Autosteer, and the rate dropped by 40 percent once the technology was activated.
In a calculation like this, it's important for the numerator and denominator to be drawn from the same set of data points. If the miles from a particular car aren't in the denominator, then crashes for that same car can't be in the numerator—otherwise the results are meaningless.
Yet according to QCS, that's exactly what NHTSA did. Tesla provided NHTSA with data on 43,781 vehicles, but 29,051 of these vehicles were missing data fields necessary to calculate how many miles these vehicles drove prior to the activation of Autosteer. NHTSA handled this by counting these cars as driving zero pre-Autosteer miles. Yet NHTSA counted these same vehicles as having 18 pre-Autosteer crashes—more than 20 percent of the 86 total pre-Autosteer crashes in the data set. The result was to significantly overstate Tesla's pre-Autosteer crash rate."
Sounds about right. Some jackass was showing off Autopilot last week in the parking garage, and promptly crashed into a parked car.
I don't understand why? Teslas are great cars, there's nothing else that comes close in a lot of categories (longest range electric car, biggest charging network, fastest acceleration, best user interface, ...).
These cars are full of superlatives, and yet they still don't think it's enough, and they make ridiculous exaggerations... I just don't get it.