

Tim Levin
Apr. 23, 2021, 11:24 AM
Model 3 interior
Tesla's safety statistics lack important context, experts say.
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Musk has repeatedly touted Autopilot - which automates some driving tasks but doesn't grant cars full autonomy - as a revolutionary safety feature that can slash the likelihood of getting in a crash by a factor of 10. But the data Tesla uses to back up that claim is incomplete at best.

According to the electric-car maker's safety report from the first three months of 2021 - which Musk tweeted about hours before the crash - the company logged one crash for every 4.19 million miles driven on Autopilot. Measured against the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's US average of an incident roughly every 484,000 miles, Tesla's self-reported figure appears mighty impressive.

But Tesla's statistics don't show the full picture, experts say.



So comparing miles driven on Autopilot to national statistics that include a huge variety of driving environments - from packed city streets to unmarked rural roads - gives Tesla a major edge. Highways generally see fewer crashes on the whole than urban environments, and only 17% of fatal crashes occurred on interstates and freeways in 2019, according to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.






For instance, we don't know how Tesla treats cases where Autopilot disengaged before crashing, Abuelsamid says. Just because Autopilot wasn't enabled at the time of a crash, that doesn't mean it wasn't on just before or that it didn't shut off without the driver noticing.


For Missy Cummings, an engineering professor at Duke University who studies autonomous vehicles, a more pressing issue is that Tesla markets Autopilot - and its more advanced, $10,000 Full Self-Driving feature - in ways that exaggerate their capabilities.



Moreover, Cummings says she wouldn't trust any data that hasn't been reviewed by an independent organization - whether it's from Tesla, General Motors, or any other automaker.


However, despite years of scrutiny surrounding Autopilot's risks - NHTSA has opened investigations into at least 28 recent Tesla wrecks - the electric-car maker hasn't provided airtight statistics about the system's safety record to assuage consumer-safety advocates.


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