More in the article on chase cars, cross-country drives and the statistics of autonomy.
Bolding is mine.
Brad Templeton
Forbes January 23, 2026
Waymo’s pretty good, of course. Elon Musk has declared he wants to be “twice as good” as human drivers. That’s easier. They [humans] have a police reported crash every 500,000 miles, and a minor crash about every 150,000 miles. So maybe Tesla only needs to get 20 times better.
People have a hard time with this math. They see the car make 200 perfect drives in a row, and conclude it’s “almost there" when that statistic actually means it’s only 1% of the way.
Of course, Tesla’s private internal FSD build could be much better than this. Indeed, it could be “almost there” because you can have a supervised car that’s 99.9% of the way there and ready to stop supervision tomorrow, and also have a supervised car that’s 0.1% of the way there. It’s very hard for outsiders to tell the difference.
Tesla has the data, though. The public wonders, though, why they don’t release the data if it’s so great? Instead of keeping it close to the vest, they should shout it from the rooftops. They don’t shy away from boasts and bold predictions, not in the slightest. Why are they shy about data? Why do they keep doing tricks to mislead, like declaring the cars are unsupervised by having chase cars, or tele-operating Optimus robots, or misleading crash statistics? This hasn’t inspired trust and confidence.