When I did the trial on my Tesla, I also noted these kinds of things and felt like I had to take control.
But at the end of the day, only the numbers matter.
Even if it is true that the data show that with FSD (not Autopilot) enabled, drivers are in fewer crashes, I would be worried about other confounding factors.
For instance, I would assume that drivers are more likely to engage FSD in situations of lower complexity (less traffic, little construction or other impediments, overall lesser traffic flow control complexity, etc.) I also believe that at least initially, Tesla only released FSD to drivers with high safety scores relative to their total driver base, another obvious confounding factor.
Happy to be proven wrong though if you have a link to a recent study that goes through all of this.
You have a Mercedes, Mercedes takes responsibility.
You have a Tesla, you take the responsibility.
Says a lot.
Perhaps FSD isn't ready for city streets yet, but it's great on the highways and I'd 1000x prefer we make progress rather than settle for the status quo garbage that the legacy makers put out. Also, human drivers are the most dangerous, by far, we need to make progress to eventual phase them out.
Maybe you have a deathwish, but I definitely don't. Your choices affect other humans in traffic.
You have two imperfect systems for highway driving: Autopilot with human oversight, and humans. The first has far far less death. Yet you are choosing the second.
Technically, that is the easiest way to get a perfect safety record and journalists will seemingly just go along with the charade.
Maybe that could be a problem with future versions, but I don't see it happening with 12.3.x. I've also heard that driver attention monitoring is pretty good in the later versions, but I have no first hand experience yet.
I wonder how things are inside your head. Are you ignorant or affected by some strong bias?
I'm not quite sure what you meant by your second paragraph, but I'm sure I have my blind spots and biases. I do have direct experience with various versions of 12.x though (12.3 and now 12.5).
How often does an autonomous driving system get the driver into a dicey situation, but the driver notices the bad behavior, takes control, and avoids a crash? I don't think we have publicly-available data on that at all.
You admit that you ran into some of these sorts of situations during your trial. Those situations are unacceptable. An autonomous driving system should be safer than a human driver, and should not make mistakes that a human driver would not make.
Despite all the YouTube videos out there of people doing unsafe things with Tesla FSD, I expect that most people that use it are pretty responsible, are paying attention, and are ready to take over if they notice FSD doing something wrong. But if people need to do that, it's not a safe, successful autonomous driving system. Safety means everyone can watch TV, mess around on their phone, or even take a nap, and we still end up with a lower crash rate than with human drivers.
The numbers that are available can't tell us if that would be the case. My belief is that we're absolutely not there.
Scroll down to Methodology at https://www.tesla.com/VehicleSafetyReport
The FSD numbers are much more hidden.
The general accident rate is 1 per 400’000 miles driven.
FSD has one “critical disengagement” (aka before accident if human or safety braking doesn’t intervene) every 33 miles driven.
It means to reach unsupervised with human quality they would need to improve it 10’000 times in few months. Not saying it is impossible, just highly optimistic. In 10 years we will be there, but in 2 months, sounds a bit overpromising.
That's not a crash (fortunately!), but it is a failure of the autonomous system.
This is hard to track, though, of course: people might take over control for reasons unrelated to safety, or people may misinterpret something that's safe as unsafe. So you can't just track this from a simple "human driver took control".
Also, Tesla is known to disable self-driving features right before collisions to give the appearance of driver fault.
And the coup de grace: if Tesla's own data showed that FSD was actually safer, they'd be shouting it from the moon, using that data to get self-driving permits in CA, and offering to assume liability if FSD actually caused an accident (like Mercedes does with its self driving system).
Oh? Who are presenting the numbers?
Is a crash that fails to trigger the airbags still not counted as a crash?
What about the car turning off FSD right before a crash?
How about adjusting for factors such as age of driver and the type of miles driven?
The numbers don't make sense because they're not good comparisons and are made to make Tesla look good.
for whatever does exist, it is also easy to imagine how they could be misleading. for instance i've disengaged FSD when i noticed i was about to be in an accident. if i couldn't recover in time, the accident would not be when FSD is on and depending on the metric, would not be reported as a FSD induced accident.
Are these the numbers reported by tesla, or by some third party?
Also how about: it turns into oncoming traffic, but there isn't much oncoming traffic, and that traffic swerves to get out of the way, before FSD realizes what it's done and pulls back into the correct lane. We certainly don't have data on that.
"To ensure our statistics are conservative, we count any crash in which Autopilot was deactivated within 5 seconds before impact"
https://www.tesla.com/en_gb/VehicleSafetyReport
Situations which inevitably cause a crash more than 5 seconds later seem like they would be extremely rare.