Presumably they meant airbag deployment crashes in Teslas. We can estimate the absolute number from Tesla's press release in December stating that 1.3 billion

Presumably they meant airbag deployment crashes in Teslas. We can estimate the absolute number from Tesla's press release in December stating that 1.3 billion miles have been driven on Autopilot, while the NHTSA report states the accidents they count occur 0.8 times per million miles. So in that case it's data from about 1000 crashes in the Autopilot case, and more in the non-Autopilot case. Which tells us that the statistics should be good enough (anything else would be a major scandal). However, that is not what they are comparing! As the NHTSA report states in footnote 21, they're not actually comparing Autopilot miles to normal driving. They are comparing crash rates in vehicles before and after Autopilot was installed in those vehicles. That muddies the waters quite a bit in my opinion, especially when they don't tell us how significant this decrease is. I'm not saying it's wrong, but I'm also not very confident that it is a causal effect, as opposed to just a correlation. Here is a PDF link to the NHTSA report, since TFA only links to a Scribd (thus unusable) version. https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/inv/2016/INCLA-PE16007-7876.PDF https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/inv/2016/INCLA-PE16007-7876.PDF