I think you have answered the question of why they only are releasing a 100 cars. Tesla has million cars on the road, yet everyone talks about the car that runs into a truck or fire-engine.

Considering the odds, it is likely you would see no accidents if you only look at just 100 Tesla cars.

This would be more impressive they put 100,000 cars on the road and then we saw the stats.

> everyone talks about the car that runs into a truck or fire-engine.

Not to mention that plenty of non-self driving cars run into stationary vehicles on both motorways and ordinary roads.

A fireman I spoke to says it happens all the time and that the fire engine is parked upstream of the incident that they are dealing with so that errant vehicles run into it rather than the fire crew.

It is a matter of lively debate in the UK right now with regard to 'Smart Motorways' which have no hard shoulder, several people have been killed in collisions with stationary vehicles.

In fact even on motorways with hard shoulders a number of people have died because they stopped on the hard shoulder because of a breakdown and another vehicle strayed onto the hard shoulder and rear ended them at 70 mph.

I would prefer roads that are not the test lab of some dystopian experiment for some rich people.

You might be disappointed to learn that human drivers run into firetrucks way more often than Teslas.

The current rate as of October is:

Tesla Autopilot Accidents: 1 out of 4,530,000 Miles; US Average: 1 out of 479,000 Miles

Most accidents happen where Tesla autopilot isn’t being used like city driving and exiting and entering the freeway. Sitting in one lane on the freeway is the safest thing you can be doing and any car with lane centering and adaptive cruise control can do it. That’s why those numbers are a joke. I use autopilot everyday day on a 45 mile commute and my only accident is entering the freeway where my car and another car merged into the same lane.

Nothing better than A/B testing within the same population, right?

> In the 4th quarter, we registered one accident for every 3.45 million miles driven in which drivers had Autopilot engaged. For those driving without Autopilot but with our active safety features, we registered one accident for every 2.05 million miles driven. For those driving without Autopilot and without our active safety features, we registered one accident for every 1.27 million miles driven.

Even if you assume most accidents happen in that last group, city driving with AP off, that ratio (3.45:1.27) is better than the overall estimated proportion of city vs highway accidents for all vehicles, at 2.3:1. At a minimum, AP is making highway driving 10-20% safer, and obviously not causing any new city accidents when it’s off.

AP doesn't switch lanes. SO you turn it off during these events. It's not an AB test since AP is used in a very specific scenario where a person driving is used in situations where AP is incapable of handling like dealing with a stalled vehicle on the road.

How confident are we in the first number? Accidents usually do not happen just because on a straight road, they happen when something unexpected happens. How many unexpected cases were recorded in the first number vs the second? Because simply because of the number of teslas on the roads, I doubt many.

We're absolutely not, but Tesla fans love to repeat this quote, no matter how many times it is explained to them.

You cannot at all equate "subset of miles where AP is a possibility, be it good conditions/road/weather", where AP will turn off or not be available because it can't work, with "all the miles driven by humans in all conditions", and say in any way with a straight face, "Look, safer!". But that's what Elon, and a large number of people do.

That’s where the “per mile” part comes in.

Not sure how this factors in but autopilot primarily only works on the highway.

It’s certainly possible that city driving is safer and also more complex to be done autonomously but it’s something that needs to be considered.

The ratio of city vs highway accidents is 2.3 to 1. At worse the Tesla number is cut in half.

As an owner of a Tesla with FSD. My car would have ran into a stalled car in the carpool lane and has tried to change lanes into a concrete barrier. Tesla is level 2 and needs your attention to be safe.