Otherwise every car brand will have to kill a whole heap of people too until they manage to make a FSD system.
Also, "years of death and injury" is a bald-faced lie. NHTSA would have shut down FSD a long time ago if it were happening. The statistics Tesla has released to the public are lacking, it's true, but they cannot hide things from the NHTSA. FSD has been on the road for years and a billion miles and if it was overall significantly worse than normal driving (when supervised, of course) the NHTSA would know by now.
The current investigation is about performance under specific conditions, and it's possible that improvement is possible and necessary. But overall crash rates have not reflected any significant extra danger by public use of FSD even in its primitive and flawed form of earlier this year and before.
The report measures accidents in FSD mode. Qualifiers to FSD mode: the conditions, weather, road, location, traffic all have to meet a certain quality threshold before the system will be enabled (or not disable itself). Compare Sunnyvale on a clear spring day to Pittsburgh December nights.
There's no qualifier to the "comparison": all drivers, all conditions, all weather, all roads, all location, all traffic.
It's not remotely comparable, and Tesla's data people are not that stupid, so it's willfully misleading.
This report does not include fatalities. It also doesn't consider any incident where there was not airbag deployment to be an accident. Sounds potentially reasonable until you consider:
- first gen airbag systems were primitive: collision exceeds threshold, deploy. Currently, vehicle safety systems consider duration of impact, speeds, G-forces, amount of intrusion, angle of collision, and a multitude of other factors before deciding what, if any, systems to fire (seatbelt tensioners, airbags, etc.) So hit something at 30mph with the right variables? Tesla: "this is not an accident".
- Tesla also does not consider "incident was so catastrophic that airbags COULD NOT deploy*" to be an accident, because "airbags didn't deploy". This umbrella could also include egregious, "systems failed to deploy for any reason up to and including poor assembly line quality control", as also not an accident and also "not counted".
This is important because I'd bet similar data on the use of standard, non-adaptive cruise control would similarly show it's much safer than human drivers. But of course that would be because people use cruise control most in long-distance highway driving outside of congested areas, where you're least likely to have an accident.
You've been lied to.