Whether Tesla has a lower accidents/mile rate (or is some factor better or worse) is a red herring [1]. The key factor in whether this is a legitimate flaw in

Whether Tesla has a lower accidents/mile rate (or is some factor better or worse) is a red herring [1]. The key factor in whether this is a legitimate flaw in Tesla's system is: could an alert, competent driver easily avoid the accident?. An alternate formulation of this criteria is: would it be relatively easy for an engineer to hard-code a brute-force solution to the edge case, if they really wanted to? Obviously we'll need to see the crash video to verify, but my guess is the answer is yes, this is a legitimate flaw in Tesla's system. Tesla's system should have been able to detect a car traveling perpendicular to the highway [2]. Tesla's system was unfortunately not sophisticated enough to detect a car that an alert human would be able to detect in their peripheral vision, and their system was not sophisticated enough to perform the simple action that a human would be able to perform (slamming on brakes). In fact, if they ever want to scale up to a full urban-capable system this is a situation they need to be able to handle. Examples of accidents where I wouldn't blame Tesla's system: the other car swerves across the center divide and hits you head on, the other car is speeding and rear ends you, the car in the next lane swerves into you, the tire blows out and you hit a tree, etc. Although in the long-term we would ideally have systems that could handle these situations. [1] We need to wait for more miles and (inevitable) accidents to be logged rather than rely on this one data point. Also my guess is highway driving is less fatality prone than urban driving, on a per-mile basis.