this post was submitted on 04 Jan 2024
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Tesla say it crashes enough to deploy an airbag about one fifth as often as human drivers (once per 3,200,000 miles versus once per 600,000)
So safer than the average driver, presumably less safe than a safe driver
Be wary of cherry picked data.
The average human driver has a car that's five years older than the oldest model 3. This means five years more age on various safety equipment, five years more primitive collision avoidance systems, cars without stability control, etc.
The autopilot system only engages in ideal circumstances. Poor visibility, poorly marked road, bad weather, all scenarios that are high risk that autopilot wont touch that also cause a lot of human accidents.
I'm talking full self driving beta, not autopilot. FSD works on bad roads, car parks, any weather it can see in, including moderately heavy rain. It won't work in heavy fog, but I won't drive in that either. Autopilot has a long history of only working on highways which upped its safety, but also a history of working hands off and at any speed.
Also note that the initial beta was only open to the safest, most responsible, drivers according to Tesla data (Tesla have a lot of data on their drivers, many opt in to sharing everything in the hope of hurrying better automation) so the cars were very well supervised
I'm really hanging out for insurance data once this system is out of beta
Even with FSD, I don't think we can be anywhere close to a comparable cohort.
To expand on the safety equipment, I wager the average driver with their 12.5 year old car also doesn't have regen braking. So while 99% of Teslas likely have near pristine brake systems due to age and regen braking, the average driver is more likely to experience "surprise, your brakes are out!"
Also, particularly based on my time with rural folk with cars in the woods, I'm highly doubtful that no matter how aggressive FSD may be, it won't be as daring as some dubious human operators in that "average" cohort.
Also, I'd wonder how Tesla would treat an FSD deactivation by driver intervention. If a crash is unavoidable and imminent, I'd imagine an aware driver might manage to yank the wheel in time to deactivate, but still get in an airbag deploying crash.
There's also some potetntial slush around "accidents that activate airbags". Different models have different sensitivies.
But all this falls second to a primary concern: never trust what amounts to marketing data from any company compared to something like NHTSA data.
Would be interesting if someone could do the legwork to manage "like for like" to tell safety due to: -General age of car in general -Regenerative braking versus standard -Stability control, collision avoidance, automatic braking and so forth -Like for like driving conditions -Data for Teslas including human operation, autopilot and FSD. Particularly if human operator, but FSD was on less than 10 seconds before impact.
That really doesn't happen from wear. Brakes only surprise fail on long descents where the driver doesn't use engine braking. If brakes fail like that you have the hand brake/e-brake
EVs of course use regen braking almost always in that situation - though they can't when their battery is full - my car expects to arrive at the coast at 20% battery, at the top of the coastal mountain range it's at 15%, but at the beach it has regenerated to 20%
The rest I generally agree. We need better data, especially better data from someone other than Tesla.