So at the end of the day, you have spotless records for the autopilot that was driving many many miles on the straight line and humans having accidents at short intersections or construction sites. This translates into very favorable numbers for autopilot when presented as accidents per miles driven.
Case A: Non Tesla Human drives 999 easy miles and 1 hard mile
Case B: Autopilot drives 999 easy miles, and human drives 1 hard mile
If the effect size of the hard mile is so large that its skewing the statistics, you would expect the Telsa human driver to have a horrendous per mile accident rate relative to the non tesla human driver. What's most likely is that the accidents following a human handoff get correctly allocated to the Autopilot and the effect size being described is not actually that significant.
Humans don’t crash at every tricky situation but Tesla claims that humans are horrible drivers and their cars gives the control to the humans when when something happens.
If your premise is to be believed as a significant effect, you must also accept that this outcome should be visible in the data
A Tesla can relatively safely cover traffic like divided or controlled access highways. That's a very narrow slice of all possible driving situations and not one responsible for most accidents.
Also the oldest Tesla with AP is less than 10 years old (with an average of 3-4 years given the sales trends). The average age of cars on the street in the US is over 12 years old. An accident statistic that looks at reasonably new, premium cars against everything else won't paint the correct picture.
Is that the only reason? I suspect that many (most) student drivers are also in general more alert, drive slower, and follow each rule/guideline to an extreme. If they don’t the instructor will probably end the lesson and remove a dangerous driver of the road.
Tesla publishes their own data for the safety of autopilot, which I presume is based on their own analysis of accident records. Is this same detailed information available to other groups (insurers, NIST, etc)? Or do they just calculate an aggregate "Tesla mile per accident" rate that is a blend of the great autopilot rate and horrible human rate?
I'm not trying to be facetious here. I have no idea if this data is available to any groups other than Tesla themselves. And if so, do they publish those numbers?
The human rate for tesla driven miles tends to be ~4x better than the other brands' average. To precisely answer this question you would want to see both a comparable brand's humans' performance; and probably the split of humans who used autopilot and humans who don't ever use autopilot. We don't have that, but in my personal opinion there's enough evidence to suggest it's probably not a grand conspiracy. I'm of the opinion that autopilot being ballpark on par with other drivers is more than enough to reduce accidents substantially, at scale.
Tesla tends to say that autopilot crashes occur 1/2 as often as non autopilot crashes. That's likely not normalized to road conditions. But if you assume that Tesla is secretly just putting all the hard miles on the humans, then that would imply humans are driving many more hard miles and should have higher accident rates. The autopilots meanwhile must be performing worse on the easy miles and racking up additional accidents that wouldn't have otherwise happened.
If you combine those two, the overall rate of accidents should be higher than average, but it's actually lower by a fair margin. Again, normalization is hard.
Ideally you would be able to compare human drivers of another comparable car brand to the human drivers of Tesla to confirm the Tesla drivers don't seem to be being judged on unreasonably difficult conditions.
Tesla Autopilot is judged only by the miles driven without disengagement, which is quite limited actually. You can watch Youtube videos to see at what kind of situations Tesla autopilot gives up.
There’s no situation where the Autopilot takes over from the human saying “That’s a tricky road, let me handle it”.
A non tesla driver should be doing way better because they get to pad their score with the easy roads the autopilot supposedly gets.
On a dumb average tesla is way better, but it'd be more compelling if we could compare to new luxury brands with similar target markets
If another comparable car company published their human accident rate, and you were willing to assume that the baseline human accident rate should be the same for both brands, you could evaluate your hypothesis that Tesla is shoving the tricky situations onto humans.
Or that that negative effect is lost in the orders of magnitude of "all human drivers across all miles" versus FSD.