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In 2017, the USA had 37,133 motor vehicle fatalities, at a rate of 11.6 per billion vehicle miles driven.

I’m having difficulty finding a recent figure for how many miles Tesla autopilot has driven, but they reached over 1.2 billion by July last year.

3 deaths is 3 too many, of course, but it’s also 10.9 less than one should expect for 1.2 billion miles driven.

The number of Tesla-related deaths is much higher than Tesla reports.[1] At least 4 in California, at least 11 worldwide. That article points out how low the death rate for large luxury cars is, too. Tesla is at about 4x the death rate for the luxury car industry.

[1] https://medium.com/@MidwesternHedgi/teslas-driver-fatality-r...

The author of the article admits that his fund is short TSLA. I don't know why I would believe his data.

Elon Musk is long TSLA so we shouldn't believe him either.

I would argue someone in a short position has more incentive to produce negative news than someone in a long position does to produce positive news.

Teslas are arguably sports cars more than luxury cars. You should really be looking at the driver statistics shouldn't you?

"Sports car" is just a marketing label now, says Road and Track.[1] Once a "sports car" was a little 2-seater with a roll bar and a 5-point harness. Not a 5-seater with a deluxe interior. Now, it's just a PR term.

[1] https://www.roadandtrack.com/car-culture/a28225/sports-car-d...

Perhaps, but they're marketing to different people and have clearly different driver populations and accident statistics even though the cars themselves are probably not much different.

This is a biased article.

I do like that the article does some analysis to deduce that the NHTSA-FARS data is incorrect for Tesla and they make several well reasoned arguments why. Then using other data sources, they try to extrapolate what the correct data might be.

The problem is that the Tesla data in the NHTSA-FARS database is lower than expected. Yet they are comparing the "fixed" Tesla data with the rest of the data in the database that they take at face value.

It goes to reason if the NHTSA-FARS data for Tesla is easily proven to be underestimated (i.e. there are actually more fatal accidents than shown) that the data for other car manufacturers and models are also underestimated.

Their argument is the Tesla data is underestimated because, as a new and relatively unknown car manufacturer, Tesla is often miscoded.

It seems like these concerns are much less applicable to a BMW or other manufacturer of large luxury cars.

That article is fairly damning.

I’m not convinced yet (and neither am I convinced of Tesla’s claims). You can’t make strong causal claims from observational studies. Run a real experiment and I’ll take these claims more seriously.

(For example, there are a ton of potential confounding variables that could be causing the difference other than the safety of the car, like demographic differences.)

The burden of proof is on the claimant, whether it’s Tesla claiming their vehicles are safe or skeptics claiming they’re not. Until then, neither adds much to the discourse.

Until the onus is on Tesla to prove their claims, rather than cherry picking statistics for marketing, it's better to be sceptical of what they say about safety of an unproven emerging technology that they are emphasizing to sell more cars. Basically, Tesla needs to prove that this reasonable analysis is wrong because they are the people making the claims about safety.

They really shouldn't get the benefit of the doubt. The burden of proof is on the company selling a system to control a two ton vehicle travelling over 70mph.

This is not an apples to apples comparison. Tesla autopilot only drives the easiest subset of what a human driver can do and has a human supervising it while it does it to catch mistakes. This paints a picture that is disingenuous.

It's like having a doctor that only accepts completely healthy 20 year old patients quoting their stats compared to the general population.

These cars are no where near being fully autonomous and the story that Elon is paining about this happening in a few years with the sensors in a Tesla and the current state of research is a fantasy. End of the day he's a car salesman so take it with a pinch of salt.

What is the general vehicular fatality rate on roads and under conditions where Autopilot is usable?

"For instance, in 2007 0.54 people were killed for every 100 million vehicle miles driven on urban interstates, compared with 0.92 for every 100 million vehicle miles driven on other urban highways and arterials, and 1.32 killed on local urban streets."

http://freakonomics.com/2010/01/29/the-irony-of-road-fear/

Musk references OP's attitude in the interview. Tesla gets about 100x attention on it is other car companies. How many people gave died in a Lexus in the past 5 years? And how many of those deaths could have been been prevented by Lexus making safety a higher priority?

A better question though is what is the regulator's responsibility to approve a new technology like auto pilot when we know the general public will ignore the statistics and focus on the tangible deaths?

The worst part of this whole thing to me is Musk's blatant disregard for human life to protect the value of his company. 3 people have died

It's all relative. Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg hears that and says: "hold my beer".

Boeing timeline:

   Oct 29, 2018 Lion Air crash, 189 dead

   Nov 10, 2018 pilots already talking about Boeing
   emergency airworthiness directive related to MCAS[1]

   Mar 10, 2019 Ethiopian Airlines crash kills 157

   Mar 11, 2019 Boeing CEO "confident in 737 MAX safety"[2]

Then the Boeing CEO drops his mic and says "Your move, Elan!"

Sorry to be so cynical, but the Boeing stuff really bothers me. Boeing management behavior was worse than Tesla's.

[1] https://www.pprune.org/rumours-news/614857-indonesian-aircra... [2] https://www.reuters.com/article/ethiopia-airplane-boeing-ceo...

3 people ain't that much. If I was Musk a good PR would be to visit their funeral. Since kills by autopilot are smaller than by human factor.

>Musk's blatant disregard for human life to protect the value of his company

He could also be developing autopilot to save human lives. There are a lot of road deaths each year which is not going to be fixed by doing nothing.

When he is working on making safe automated driving, then yes. When he is exaggerating the capabilities of what has been achieved so far, and thereby encouraging a dangerous over-reliance on the equipment, then definitely no.

I'd accept the claim that autopilot is dangerous if it had brought a car into a state that an alert/situational-aware and normally skilled driver could not recover from. That's not what happened. These people have died because they thought they had got better things to do than monitoring the traffic.

Tesla’s autopilot has saved many lives already according to known statistics. Also, because Tesla’s have the highest safety rating, they have also saved lives in accidents.

Tesla compared itself to crash/fatality data that included motorcycles in order to look better than they are.