Additionally, the Tesla cohort is really modern high-safety passenger vehicles IMO. A < 5 year old passenger vehicle with stability control, etc could easily be statistically as safe as a Tesla.
A 15km radius from my house would nearly cover all but the most far-flung areas of the medium-sized city that I live in. The vast majority of my driving would be within that radius, so it's not surprising the majority of my driving accidents would be within that radius.
Just for reference, a disk with a radius of 15km would have an area of 700km². You could compare that with the area of Chicago (590km²) or New York City (780km²).
You’ll often read this, yes, but I read a fascinating breakdown that called BS on the whole thing.
It's that last item that I'm focussing on.
In other words, are we statistically more likely to crash near home? Yes. Are we more likely to have an accident simply because we are close to home? Not likely. If two thirds of accidents (for example) are within 5 miles of home, what percent of your driving is within 5 miles? If it's also two thirds, then it's a useless statistic that is thrown around for FUD purposes.
I can't back it up right now, though.
I live pretty much exactly one mile from my work, and the two nearest shopping centres are less than half a mile beyond that.
I'd definitely be interested in seeing some heat maps of representing this data. It's easy to believe that the majority of people live close to at least one of the places they most often travel to, whether that is a workplace or other activity, and I think you're right that this is an important metric within which to consider such statistics.
You're answering your own question there; they're doing it not with assumed evil intent ("let's lie about the safeties so that people kill themselves ! meuahahah") but for PR and stock reasons, but it ends up being the same result: they want people to see autopilot as "it drives for you" if you're a car buyer or an investor, but they also want people to see it as "it's just a helper, it doesn't drive you need to drive" if you're a regulatory agency, a judge or a customer that got into a crash.
As for the stats comparison removing motorbikes is a big one sure, but you could go one step further and take into account only the miles on free/highway and let's compare it again, because if the US is anything like here in France most accident are in the 15 Km around the drivers' home (probably because the driver feel "safer" because he knows the road) and that's also when autopilot is the least likely to be on. Meaning they're comparing themselves with a lot of miles where they're not competing.
And even further than that, no matter how safe/unsafe you are, if all your crash ends up with "the driver should have been handling the wheel but wasn't" then it doesn't mean all those drivers did it wrong, for me it's more a case of "you disengage/safety system is incapable of handling a case that's causing fatalities yet is common enough that all your crash report point at it".