On one hand, a few years ago no one could have predicted autonomous driving to become a subject so popular and already becoming a reality in a time so short. On the other, people now complain that the feature is not yet globally available and it’s only a beta version, attacking Elon Musk for predicting full self-drive (FSD) becoming ready each year until it actually did (at least the beta). He also predicted that one year after that, cars will become better drivers than humans, so are we already there? Currently, FSD beta, Tesla’s name for the full autonomous driving feature, is used by over 100,000 people. If we take the average statistics for U.S. drivers, there are 12.4 fatal accidents per year per 100,000 people and 163 accidents with injuries each month. FSD beta has been deployed to over 60,000 people for around 5 months now with the last month having over 100,000 users with no injury or fatality resulting accidents reported.
Of course, there have been many incidents with Tesla cars and a lot of accidents filmed (there have also been a lot of accidents prevented on camera by Tesla cars), but we will have to assume that FSD beta was probably not involved and stick to autonomous driving caused accident rate. With that being said, statistics do not represent the full story. Firstly, only 100,000 drivers use it as opposed to the U.S. population from which the 100,000 average was calculated which means the sample of drivers that use FSD beta could just be an outlier. Moreover, Tesla has carefully selected the drivers to whom they deployed the option to use FSD beta, choosing only those with the highest safety score, meaning they already had a much better average for avoiding accidents. Not only that, but we also have to consider that the sample of people that afford and buy Tesla cars are not at all representative of the U.S. population on average. These are mostly people over 30 years old with a good education and a responsible life overall. Taking all of these into account, we could say that the people that have and use FSD beta in no way are a yardstick for the average population and those statistics could be much different had FSD beta been released to a more diverse group of people. We can only wait for autonomous driving to be more widely deployed by both Tesla and other car companies before we can make a fair comparison between humans and cars when it comes to driving safety.
References:
[1] Elon Musk updates timeline for a self-driving car, but how does Tesla play into it? (2017) https://electrek.co/2017/12/08/elon-musk-tesla-self-driving-timeline/
[2] Tesla Full Self Driving Actually Safer Than Human Drivers So Far (2022) https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2022/04/actual-safety-statistics-around-tesla-full-self-driving.html
Hi Tudor,
I really like the research you did and the findings that came along with it! Especially the fact that you take into account the fact that Tesla customers are not representative as opposed to the whole population. I also did not know that Tesla carefully selected the participants for the FSD Beta!
Autonomous driving is indeed a technology that sort of skyrocketed during the last years especially thanks to Elon Musk and Tesla. I also think that, in order to really reach the benefits associated with autonomous driving every car should be able to drive by itself. With all cars communicating with each other this can cause for less congestion during peak hours of traffic and it can lead to less accidents as well.
It is however evident that autonomous driving (in case everything works well) is much more safe than ‘human driving’ as the software will be busy with driving only while humans tend to lose their attention to other, ‘more urgent’ things like phone calls.