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After the first fatality while on Autopilot, the NHTSA did a study on whether Autopilot was inherently safe and whether it had any defects that needed to be add
by chc 9y ago
After the first fatality while on Autopilot, the NHTSA did a study on whether Autopilot was inherently safe and whether it had any defects that needed to be addressed. It found that Teslas with Autopilot were substantially safer than Teslas without. I'd like to see a better study (since that one was mainly aimed at answering the question of whether Teslas with Autopilot should be recalled), but someone has looked into it at least.
- frgtpsswrdlame 9y agoThat's not quite accurate, the NHTSA study was not designed, in any way, to compare human-driven miles and autopilot-driven miles for safety. The only thing it showed was that vehicles with TACC + Autosteer had less accidents than vehicles with just TACC. Whether TACC + Autosteer is safer than human drivers is up for debate.
- URSpider94 9y agoTrue. However, it shows a very substantial decrease in accident rate in the population with Autopilot features, vs. the population without. Correlation, not causality. It could be that Model X drivers are inherently safer than Model S drivers (they would be in the latter set), or it could be that just having the features in the car makes drivers do better even without using them. However, the inference that Autopilot reduces incidents per mile seems very likely to be true.