Let's see...a 2019 Ars article, sourcing analysis from a company (QCS) that no longer provides a web site, is claiming that the 2016 data (8 years ago) can be i

Let's see...a 2019 Ars article, sourcing analysis from a company (QCS) that no longer provides a web site, is claiming that the 2016 data (8 years ago) can be interpreted to show a higher crash rate on autopilot than NHTSA computed at that time. This is, of course, very old news. There's far more data available today. Indeed, this old article says "Tesla could settle the debate by releasing more data". Great! What does current data say? There are two pretty good sources of data. One is Tesla's quarterly vehicle safety reports, and the other is NHTSA's mandatory crash reporting data. Tesla's quarterly data tells a pretty convincing story, from 18Q4 through to 23Q4. The US average accident rate has stayed almost unchanged that whole time, providing a useful baseline. What is completely clear is that miles per crash goes from 3.35 million (18Q4) to 5.39 million (23Q4). Occam's razor provides the simplest explanation: The autopilot software just keeps getting better at avoiding crashes. The currently popular way of poking holes in Tesla's safety reports is to say "of course autopilot miles per crash are better; they're all on the highway and it's unfair to compare". First, anybody who drives a Tesla will tell you that autopilot gets activated all the time off freeways, by all kinds of drivers. Current criticism of the quarterly safety data requires adopting assumptions that bias the data away from the metrics that being presented. They roughly amount to "well, here is a way that this data could be inaccurate. We don't know if it is or isn't inaccurate, but it could be". But that doesn't really matter. Unless the methodology has fundamentally changed (which it hasn't), you only need to compare autopilot data against itself to see that there are huge improvements, and you can also see that at the same time, the US fleet does not improve. For the US fleet, more and more cars have active emergency braking and forward collision warning systems...but this does not seem to be improving the US seasonally adjusted averages much. It might also be interesting to compare Tesla data with cars of similar capabilities...which are mostly from the realms of super- and hyper-cars. How's the miles driven per crash there? I think it's a pretty good trick to deliver supercar performance and have dramatically superior crash stats. I also think these discussions are loaded with all kinds of people who think they are Lake Woebegon, above-average drivers.