New Vehicle Safety Report Reveals Teslas Using Autopilot Are 10x Safer
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There’s also been reports of autopilot disengaging seconds before a crash, so those technically didn’t occur while Autopilot was active
> To ensure our statistics are conservative, we count any crash in which Autopilot was deactivated within 5 seconds before impact, and we count all crashes in which the incident alert indicated an airbag or other active restraint deployed. (Our crash statistics are not based on sample data sets or estimates.) In practice, this correlates to nearly any crash at about 12 mph (20 kph) or above, depending on the crash forces generated.
Back to Tesla - what sort of warning is given when the autopilot is going to disengage?
This is answering a different question than is Autopilot effective when on, but is Autopilot capability + the human employment of it create an observable effect in accident rates.
A population study would be tricky to do, because all recent Teslas have Autopilot and Teslas as a whole are newer cars driven by rich people, with a heavy bias towards California. Further, Teslas have automatic emergency braking independent of Autopilot.
So you can’t compare accident rates as a whole, but you could compare accident rates of, say, new Mercedes or BMWs with Teslas in California, which have roughly the same capabilities and are driven by the same rich people (though possibly slightly older).
Therefore no car company that currently exists believes in safety?
How much more liable for you want?
Go ahead and nitpick how it's not strict legal liability.
Autopilot is like brakes that the maker says "they usually work but no guarantees". A higher autonomy level system would be like brakes that actually are guaranteed to work.
Autopilot might be safer, but this statistic is just a textbook example of selection bias. In order to compare one to the other, crashes in places autopilot doesn't work need to be excluded.
> Update (January 2023): We are proud of Autopilot’s performance and its impact on reducing traffic collisions. The benefit and promise of Autopilot is clear from the Vehicle Safety Report data that we have been sharing for 4 years. As part of Tesla’s commitment to continuous improvement, recent analysis led us to identify and implement upgrades to our data reporting. Specifically, we discovered reports of certain events where no airbag or other active restraint deployed, single events that were counted more than once, and reports of invalid or duplicated mileage records. Including these events is inconsistent with our methodology for the Vehicle Safety Report and they will be excluded going forward. These upgrades in data analysis reinforce the positive impact that Autopilot has on vehicle safety. To ensure the accuracy of our reporting, we updated all collision rates historically to account for these upgrades, including the baseline collision rates for the United States based on currently available NHTSA and FHWA data. (Note that for purposes of the baseline collision rates in the United States, an automobile crash is one that involves at least one passenger vehicle, light truck, SUV or van that is 10,000 pounds or less, as classified by available federal data.) The end result is that, when Autopilot is active, the collision rates are even lower than we previously reported.
Occam's razor in a situation where a hype man promised step-function improvements for well over a decade is that this is not an honest assessment or an assessment not based on honest data.
Instead we have Tesla suggesting that these cars are actually more safe. Of course they are very biased and you'd be well advised to take that with a grain of salt. There have been some incidents of course but overall it seems not a whole lot of bad stuff is actually happening. This, despite people insisting this is super dangerous, isn't working, cannot possibly be working because of reasons (imagined or real), etc.
Meanwhile other manufacturers now have proper self driving cars on the roads without a driver. Those to have had some incidents but not a whole lot of fatal ones. Lots of nay-sayers and yet the doom they spell just doesn't seem to actually happen.