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by brightball 157 days ago
> And people die all the time.

They do, but the rate is extremely low compared to the volume of drivers.

In 2024 in the US there were about 240 million licensed drivers and an estimated 39,345 fatalities, which is 0.016% of licensed drivers. Every single fatality is awful but the inverse of that number means that 99.984% of drivers were relatively safe in 2024.

Tesla provided statistics on the improvements from their safety features compared to the active population (https://www.tesla.com/fsd/safety) and the numbers are pretty dramatic.

Miles driven before a major collision

699,000 - US Average

972,000 - Tesla average (no safety features enabled)

2.3 million - Tesla (active safety features, manually driven)

5.1 million - Tesla FSD (supervised)

It's taking something that's already relatively safe and making it approximately 5-7 times safer using visual processing alone.

Maybe lidar can make it even better, but there's every reason to tout the success of what's in place so far.

1 comments

No, you're making the mistake of taking Tesla's stats as comparable, which they are not.

Comparing the subsets of driving on only the roads where FSD is available, active, and has not or did not turn itself off because of weather, road, traffic or any other conditions" versus "all drivers, all vehicles, all roads, all weather, all traffic, all conditions?

Or the accident stats that don't count an accident any collision without airbag deployment, regardless of injuries? Including accidents that were sufficiently serious that airbags could not or were unable to deploy?

The stats on the site break it into major and minor collisions. You can see the above link.

I have no doubt that there are ways to take issue with the stats. I'm sure we could look at accidents from 11pm - 6am compared to the volume of drivers on the road as well.

In aggregate, the stats are the stats though.