> Which will hurtle you 200mph at a wall and then disengage autopilot 100ms before hitting the wall and not count it as an autopilot death.

This is false: "To ensure our statistics are conservative, we count any crash in which Autopilot was deactivated within 5 seconds before a crash."

https://www.tesla.com/VehicleSafetyReport

It would be more helpful to focus on actually deceptive issues in how they report data, namely the conflation of easy highway miles (Autopilot enabled) with more dangerous city driving (Autopilot unavailable). For example their Q1 2021 report:

"In the 1st quarter, we registered one accident for every 4.19 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 978 thousand miles driven. By comparison, NHTSA’s most recent data shows that in the United States there is an automobile crash every 484,000 miles."

You are correct about the 100ms (although 5s is too short, should be something like 30 given our understanding of task switching) but it's worth pointing out that the comparison you quote (and all those like it, not just from Tesla) is disingenuous.

All the self driving companies do this, but it only makes sense to compare # of accidents/mile between like processes. It's an ok proxy for total risk iff accidents were uniformly distributed, but we know that isn't even close to true.

With a system like Teslas', it is preferentially, probably approximately exclusively if normalized by distance, deployed in situations with a lower accident rate - comparing that to total rates is nonsense.

What would be more interesting is Tesla vs. human accident rates on only freeway miles, say, but I haven't seen that anywhere, have you?

Best rough stats I can find is that less than 1/2 of all accidents happen on highways. There are a also a ton of fender-bender, parking lot and/or traffic jam accidents that aren't really applicable either.

Yes, and in addition, the comparison should be between similar vehicle body styles and manufacturing years.

True; a really interesting way to do these comparisons would be by narrow year, vehicle category, and purchaser (e.g. don't conflate fleet sales to private) as it normalizes a bunch of factors all at once. Sample size can be a problem, I expect.

5 seconds is not nearly enough time. If you need to drive 3 seconds behind a vehicle going the same speed as you to have safe reaction time & stopping distance, then you certainly can't (a) move your attention back to the road you weren't looking at because "autopilot" "self-driving" and (b) react to a stationary object and (c) come to a stop, all in 5.

*except in cases where the black box is totally destroyed due to 4 hour battery fires.

yeah maybe i was exaggerating but autopilot can definitely get you in positions where its impossible to get out of and the deactivate 5 secs before actual collision.

And autopilot is only engaged on highways but they are comparing its safety to accidents per mile in general. But those stats are strongly skewed by city and non-highway driving, where autopilot doesnt work at all.