[ACCount37]

That's the main advantage self-driving has over humans now.

A self-driving car of today still underperforms the top of the line human driver - but it sure outperforms the "0.1% worst case": the dumbest most inebriated sleep deprived and distracted reckless driver that's responsible for the vast majority of severe road accidents.

Statistics show it plain and clear: self-driving cars already get into less accidents than humans, and the accidents they get into are much less severe too. Their performance is consistently mediocre. Being unable to drink and drive is a big part of where their safety edge comes from.

[Xylakant]

The statistics on this are much less clear than Tesla would like us to believe. There's a lot of confounding factors, among them the fact that the autonomous driver can decide to hand over things to a human the moment things get hairy. The subsequent crash then gets credited to human error.

[ACCount37]

That's an often-repeated lie.

Tesla's crash reporting rules:

> To ensure our statistics are conservative, we count any crash in which Autopilot was deactivated within 5 seconds before impact, and we count all crashes in which the incident alert indicated an airbag or other active restraint deployed.

NHSTA's reporting rules are even more conservative:

> Level 2 ADAS: Entities named in the General Order must report a crash if Level 2 ADAS was in use at any time within 30 seconds of the crash and the crash involved a vulnerable road user being struck or resulted in a fatality, an air bag deployment, or any individual being transported to a hospital for medical treatment.

At highway speeds, "30 seconds" is just shy of an eternity.

[AlotOfReading]

Tesla doesn't report crashes that aren't automatically uploaded by the computer. NHTSA has complained about this before. Quoting one of the investigations:

    Gaps in Tesla’s telematic data create uncertainty regarding the actual rate at which vehicles operating with Autopilot engaged are involved in crashes. Tesla is not aware of every crash involving Autopilot even for severe crashes because of gaps in telematic reporting. Tesla receives telematic data from its vehicles, when appropriate cellular connectivity exists and the antenna is not damaged during a crash, that support both crash notification and aggregation of fleet vehicle mileage. Tesla largely receives data for crashes only with pyrotechnic [airbag] deployment, which are a minority of police reported crashes. A review of NHTSA’s 2021 FARS and Crash Report Sampling System (CRSS) finds that only 18 percent of police-reported crashes include airbag deployments.

From:

https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/inv/2022/INCR-EA22002-14496.pdf

[Xylakant]

Even if this were the case, it would still skew the statistics in favor of Tesla: The Autopilot gets to hand of the complicated and dangerous driving conditions to the human who then needs to deal with them. The human to the opposite cannot do the same - they need to deal with all hard situations as they come, with no fallback to hand off to.