The number of such crashes has surged over the past four years, the data shows, reflecting the hazards associated with increasingly widespread use of Tesla’s futuristic driver-assistance technology as well as the growing presence of the cars on the nation’s roadways.
The number of deaths and serious injuries associated with Autopilot also has grown significantly, the data shows. When authorities first released a partial accounting of accidents involving Autopilot in June 2022, they counted only three deaths definitively linked to the technology. The most recent data includes at least 17 fatal incidents, 11 of them since last May, and five serious injuries.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has said that cars operating in Tesla’s Autopilot mode are safer than those piloted solely by human drivers, citing crash rates when the modes of driving are compared. He has pushed the carmaker to develop and deploy features programmed to maneuver the roads — navigating stopped school buses, fire engines, stop signs and pedestrians — arguing that the technology will usher in a safer, virtually accident-free future.While it’s impossible to say how many crashes may have been averted, the data shows clear flaws in the technology being tested in real time on America’s highways.
I remember some radar sensors have been pull from the Tesla vehicle. Could that be the reason behind the uptick in incidents?
Tesla is ditching the forward-facing radar technology that’s long been used in its Advanced Driver Assistance System (ADAS), Autopilot. The news comes from support documentation found on the automaker’s website.
The new vision-only system, coined Tesla Vision, is the company’s focus on only using data captured by the vehicle’s on-board cameras and processed by machine learning technologies. This means putting radar on the same pedestal as LiDAR, which CEO Elon Musk called “a fool’s errand” during Tesla’s 2019 Autonomy Day presentation, a decision which may cause some Autopilot features to be unavailable while Tesla works out the kinks.
This article is pretty much just flooding the zone with BS.
It’s pretty much the case that almost all the data is related to Tesla because nobody else submits much data, partly because almost all the vehicles are Teslas, and partly because only Tesla makes an effort to collect crash data.
And, unsurprisingly, as the number of vehicles on the road using Tesla autonomous functions increases radically, so do the number of crashes and fatalities involving those vehicles. You will search such articles in vain for any hint of statistics or context or risk analysis. It’s all rumor and innuendo and misdirection.
The lead author of the article, Faiz Siddiqui, is a well-known repeat offender. He writes one hit piece after another, recycling the same debunked garbage. In this one, the immediate tell is that the first example he uses is not only not a fatality and not a crash, but is even only “allegedly in Autopilot mode”. This almost always means that the atrocious driver is claiming it wasn’t their fault, it was autopilot (hint: that’s never the case, because even if they had autopilot on, it’s still their fault).
4% of 43000 would be 1720 deaths…I get we are only talking when FSD is in use but still…ah actually some 17 over the years means FSD cuts down fatalities. Math is important. You can write bull all day long…but if you can not do some basic math…people will see stupid.
Fatality Facts 2021Yearly snapshot
A total of 42,939 people died in motor vehicle crashes in 2021. The U.S. Department of Transportation’s most recent estimate of the annual economic cost of crashes is $340 billion.
What percentage of the auto market is Tesla?
According to the industry data (trailing by twelve months), Tesla’s market share in the United States/Canada (counted together) is now very close to 4 percent, compared to over 3.5 percent three months earlier.Apr 21, 2023
Between 2014 and 2021 just over one million Teslas were sold in the US. There were three deaths linked to Autopilot.
However, since then US sales have increased by another 1.8 million. At the same time, the number of fatalities has increased to 17, 11 in the last 12 months.
More relevant question, how many crashes and fatalities from non-tesla cars can be attributed to their self-driving feature?
No one cares about how safe Teslas are vs other cars when under driver control. They care about how safe they are when the car is making the decisions.
This is a faulty analysis. For example, what if the use of autopilot increased by 10x during that period?
Fro example, I very rarely used autopilot in 2021, periodically in 2022, and almost always by mid-2023. The latest release is far better than previous releases, though is still nowhere near good enough to do away with the steering wheel. And it very VERY likely won’t be good enough to eliminate the steering wheel for a good number of years to come.
laff break. The local Detroit “news” finally got around to reporting this on the late news last night. For days, every “news” report on every channel had been too busy hyping the Taylor Swift concert. I swear, that woman’s publicity department is in full afterburner, all the time, flooding the media with publicity.
FSD is not only being updated constantly but has been released to different safety record drivers. First it was only to drivers with the highest safety scores and as FSD improved it was released to drivers with lower scores. This makes compsrisons very difficult. A better measure might be Tesla drivers with and without FSD or fatalities per miles driven.
There is another issue, when first released the numbers do not distinguish between FSD failure and driver error. After NHTSA investigates the crashes the real numbers come out. There are quite a few drivers at fault.
I have no numbers, only Tesla has those. BUT, considering that they just released it (beta FSD) to 100% of their vehicles instead of 10-12%, and more people (like me) can choose to use it, then the numbers are probably substantially larger.
I’ve been using FSD for 90+% of my driving since I subscribed to it. I also regularly report “bugs” or things they could do better. And when I say regularly, I mean 3 to 10 times a day. We’re on a road trip right now, so lots of driving.
