Because the accident rate is still lower than it is with humans driving.
Autopilot is getting worse not better with time, and Tesla's tendency to introduce regressions (as with the Bay Area crash) means any temporary improvements in driving AI are just that--temporary.
This number by itself is absolutely meaningless without more context.
In 2017, 37,133 people in the United States died in an automotive crash. It is expected that some number of Tesla owners will die in a crash, regardless of currently engaged safety features.
Tesla has produced around 600,000 vehicles in total, including over 100,000 Model 3 vehicles.
I'm not making any claim or dispute regarding the effectiveness of Autopilot, whether or not it's improving. I'm just saying, making that statement you made is meaningless at least and misleading at most.
I'm just pulling a page from Elon Musk and Tesla's marketing department.
Also, do you have any proof that Autopilot is getting worse over time that doesn't rely on anecdotes?
By a subset of the driving population who are less risky than the overall driving population.
EDIT: (I'm assuming for the purposes of this statement that you are correct and those were easily avoidable by an attentive driver)
The Tesla autopilot controls the throttle, brake, and steering. That meets my definition of "driving."
It routinely false positives on frontal collisions and occasionally does things that would be dangerous if I weren't driving.
The driver in a Tesla is not a mere passenger, regardless of whether or not they have enabled autopilot. The initial warnings on enabling autopilot as well as the attention nags on the steering wheel all make this perfectly clear to the driver.
[1] https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-tesla-autopilot-claim...
Tesla's has never claimed that a current vehicle can drive itself without the driver being responsible for the vehicle at all times.
> Tesla's has never claimed that a current vehicle can drive itself without the driver being responsible for the vehicle at all times.
Yes, they did. Hence why the NHTSA and other groups went after Tesla for their claims about Autopilot.
It's why people freak out about terrorism more than they do about car crashes or drug addicition.
Tesla attached a lot more caveats than you did in order to assert superior safety.
Emphasis on reliable, as Tesla's own stats are highly misleading -- they basically compare highway data, because Autopilot is mostly used on highways, to all other conditions in which accidents happen.
I'm sure that if Autopilot was active all the time, the rate of accidents would be far higher, and Tesla's numbers wouldn't look so positive.
If, as Tesla insists, these autopilot crashes are all due to the driver not paying attention, then it seems very plausible that a better attention-detecting system (one that tracked the driver's gaze, for example) would improve safety. Of course, if the system required drivers to do what Tesla says they should be doing, it would not be so appealing.
And if, as Musk is saying, drivers are confused or mistaken about the capabilities of the vehicle, then the first response should be to stop making ambivalent statements about them.
Say you stumble on a lost civilization in the woods, and they have yet to discover any form of shelter. Any time it rains or snows they all sit on the ground and half of them die of pneumonia. What do we, as engineers, do to help them? Tie some sticks together and make a lean-to? That would certainly reduce the death rate. But I don't think it would be the ethical thing to do. The ethical thing would be to help them build proper buildings out of the best available materials, install an HVAC system, fire alarms, etc.
In other words, engineering should seek to maximize benefits for users, and there are cases where choosing not to maximize benefits could be seen as unethical, even if you do provide some benefit.
In the case of Tesla, the ethical thing to do would be to include a lidar which can prevent the car from smashing into large objects at full speed.
Just because the accident rate is lower does not mean this death or all the others are acceptable. Tesla had a choice of whether to use best engineering practices, and they chose not do.
The reason they are doing this is money. They couldn't sell cars with an expensive lidar on it. And they shot themselves in the foot by charging people thousands of dollars for future "full self driving" capability. Now if they don't continue forward with this plan, with no lidar, it will have serious financial consequences for them.
Note that other self-driving companies have found a way to make lidar financially viable for them. It's not impossible.
Tesla is killing people for money.
There are fair criticisms around Tesla's marketing and implementation, but I don't think "they should already have lidar on there" is really one of them.