How Many Tesla Autopilot Deaths Would Have Occurred If Every Car In America Had Autopilot? Thousands

Wow John, you must really like doing math. How about this much simpler math. Autopilot has been installed in Tesla cars for about 4 years, and they have collectively been driven 1.4 billion miles using autopilot, and 3 people have died in that time (in the U.S.) and one more elsewhere in the world. Or an average of less than one U.S. death in a Tesla with autopilot per year. So there are 37,000 U.S. automotive deaths per year, and only One (1) of them was in a Tesla using autopilot. That sounds like pretty encouraging numbers to me. And a good sales pitch for autopilot. It sounds to me like someone should give Tesla a good safety award for this notable achievement.

The Tesla miles ARE ALL AP miles. Check your own link. And the comparison is human vs. autopilot, so alcohol, motorcycle, etc. is not a relative factor.

But it doesn't really work out that you can just assume that the accident and death rate would remain the same if ALL cars had autopilot. The reality is that in total only Three (3) people have died in Teslas in the U.S. with autopilot engaged over the last 4 years, compared to roughly 150,000 people who died over those same 4 years without Tesla's autopilot safety technology. Again, (3) deaths vs. (150,000) deaths seems like very good odds to me. There was one death in 2016, NONE in 2017, one in 2018, and one so far in 2019 even with the Tesla autopilot installed population increasing dramatically. Again, one death per year vs. 37,000 deaths in the U.S. overall is very good.

The autopilot Tesla population may be relatively small compared to ALL cars, but it is easily the LARGEST population of cars in the world actively deploying a higher level of automated driving technology. It works out positively regardless if you compare the small number of Tesla/autopilot deaths to the Tesla population alone, or if you compare to the larger population of all deaths in vehicles. In both cases the death percentages seem relatively tiny. Remember that Tesla's autopilot at this point is really supposed to have driver's attention/assistance at all times, and from what I've read the drivers were not paying attention at all. It is frankly too early to speculate on the relative safety of self driving cars. Once the technology evolves to that stage and they are deployed with full self driving autonomy. For all of the foolish accidents that I see commuting many miles every day due to impatience, substance abuse, and driver distraction, I eagerly away self driving cars, and autopilot safety technology. But I do understand that it is not perfected yet, and I am eager for the blame/fear finger pointing to die down so that the implementation of more automated technology can move forward and evolve.

I don't get your math completely.

Tesla AP has travelled 1.4 billion miles with 3 deaths (in the US).

Also in the US, 3.2 trillion miles have been driven with 37,000 deaths.

So, there is 1 death per 86 million miles.

Thus, we would expect to have seen 16 deaths in the 1.4 billion miles that Tesla AP has driven.

However, we only see 3.

Am I missing something?

Yeah, but that logic doesn't really work, because you are doing math based on projected assumptions of failure. The only facts that we know are that Teslas have driven 1.4 billion miles using autopilot, and with all those miles driven there have been 4 deaths in the whole world. Also most likely those extremely rare deaths could have been avoided if the drivers were actually paying attention, and if they were using autopilot as an assisting safety technology, as they were advised to. The most stern recommendation that I would make to Tesla would be to use eye-tracking technology to confirm that drivers are actually paying attention to the road while autopilot is engaged. I understand that Tesla is actively marketing the prospect of fully self driving cars, but considering that many people think that self driving cars are only acceptable with 100% flawless driving capability (not that humans come close to that) Tesla will probably have to delay the implementation of those more advanced self driving technologies until the lawyers can come to terms with what is an acceptable loss rate for injuries and deaths. Otherwise naysayers will only fear/project the worst, and ignore the progress that has already been made in computer aided driving systems for cars.

In the past I worked on sensor systems and visual tracking software for self driving vehicles, and some of the hardest problems that we faced were random movement or objects out of place. Like a deer jumping out in front of a car, or a stopped car in the middle of the road around a corner. During the recent torrent of raging fires in California some firefighters had parked their firetrucks in the middle of the road as they were fighting the blazes. What is interesting to me is that there was no accounting of normal cars that ran into fire trucks during that time, because it is not money making news the way that Tesla is. As far as the Tesla cars that ran into the highway barriers goes, in every one of those instances the CalTrans workers moved the concrete barriers into the roadway, crossing into the lane, and the Tesla was just following the road. I have experienced this issue firsthand locally and I personally saw several accidents due to the thoughtless roadwork and poor planning. The bigger point is that I am certain that Tesla has learned from those issues and adapted their software to anticipate those issues in the future. Accident avoidance and life saving due to automated safety equipment takes a lot of years to prove, as it has with stability control, anti-lock brakes, safety belts, airbags, tire pressure sensors, etc. And there have always been people opposed to the inclusion of such safety equipment, refuting it's value.

Just having LIDAR instead of RADAR is not necessarily a better solution for detecting stationary objects. LIDAR is similar to RADAR but uses lasers as opposed to radio waves. LIDAR systems "see" more detail, and have better angular accuracy, but RADAR is better at object detection at close distances and it "sees" better in rain, fog or snow conditions. Plus LIDAR sensors are usually larger and cost MUCH more than RADAR systems. RADAR often has the issue of merging close objects together into one larger object, but it does have the advantage of being able to discern different object's relative speed using Doppler frequency shift. When most people see these stories they imagine an empty highway with a flashing fire truck off to the side of the road, and the Tesla blindly running into the big red truck, but most likely the Tesla was in it's own driving lane and there was a car driving right in front of it, then that car quickly veered around the stationary fire truck parked in the driving lane, and neither the human driver, nor automated computer driving system could turn, or stop in time. It is one of the challenges that we saw with video camera tracking, where you cannot see through the object in front of you to detect the object (or vehicle) in front of them. And also you cannot see around an obstructed corner. The complication is that vehicle object tracking usually relies on actively ignoring most all of the static objects all around you, and instead concentrating on staying in the lane and carefully watching all of the other moving vehicles on the road. We attained the highest accuracy by using multiple, simultaneous sensors, from video, to ultrasonic, to RADAR, to LIDAR. Each sensor technology has their own advantages and disadvantages, so more of them working at the same time is better. If not 100% accurate.

Good analysis. The Telsa AP would kill 13,000 people per year, compared to 32,000 per year.

This analysis also doesn’t take in to account the fact that if every vehicle was capable of full AP, then they would all be ‘aware’ of each other.
This would mean there was a much more detailed picture, each vehicle would know it’s full relative position & speed and the would be no surprises like fire trucks in a highway lane, this would be reported to the network as a closed lane as soon as the truck stopped.
I hope we will soon see closed lanes that are AP only where vehicles will be able to join a pod travelling at 200mph bumper to bumper, that will be when the true strength can be shown.

Sir, your math here is wrong:

"We know that Tesla has a serious Autopilot crash about seven times per every 1.356 billion miles. That equals 9.492 serious crashes per 1 billion Autopilot miles driven."

If you have 7 crashes per 1.3 billion you can't have MORE than seven crashes per 1.0 billion. Your erroneously multiplied 7 by 1.356, instead of dividing by 1.356 to get the correct per-1.0b number which is 5.16 - nearly half the figure you incorrectly cited.

Looking at the deaths, not the "serious accidents", on Tesla autopilot we have 3 deaths per 1.356 billion miles. That's 1 death per 466 million miles. There are 1.25 deaths by motor vehicle per million miles driven in the US (includes peds and cyclists). I don't know that this is the best way to look at this, but it's a simple way to look at this and seems pretty compelling to me. Nonetheless, the sample of deaths is very low (which is why "serious accidents" is probably a better way to do this, if there were good statistics. Quick googling didn't not provide any figures on "serious accidents per miles driven".) I could easily imagine that with a bigger sample, the death rate on Tesla autopilot might be found to be double, or alternatively, one third. Definitely an interesting problem.

John Goreham,

You haven't yet corrected your math mistake of 9.492 serious crashes per billion AP miles, with it actually being almost *half* at 5.16 serious crashes per billion AP miles.

I would really appreciate it if someone would do an analysis of unintended accelerations in a Tesla versus other cars. Tesla is saying that people are simply pressing the accelerator instead of the brake, but I highly doubt that.

I wonder if someone driving without autopilot could have avoided these instances, or would it have been an inevitable fatal incident?

What do you think of autopilot when it is calculated as fatalities per mile? (Updated math from earlier response)

Tesla = 5.1 billion miles driven/ 9 autopilot fatalities = 566,666,666 miles between each fatality
Usa = 3.2 trillion miles driven/ 37,000 fatalities = 86,486,486 miles between each fatality

566,666,666 / 86,486,486 = 555% safer with autopilot
3.2 trillion / 566,666,666 = 5,647 deaths if all vehicles had autopilot (31,352 lives saved per year)

These calculations take in a few assumptions. Fewer motorcycles crashing into vehicles due to autopilot collision avoidance. People with autopilot would switch it on while drunk, distracted, or speeding, increasing their safety by 555% and reducing their chance of death by 85%

Another factor to pay close attention to is if autopilot has fewer than 1 fatality per 86.5m miles, then there is a good argument to implement it, since not implementing it is directly related to allowing people to die that otherwise would have lived, even if it means 1 person may die due to Autopilot error for every 6.6 deaths saved from human error.

It’s the classic trolley problem from psychology. We can do nothing and let ~7 people die and one live, but if we choose save 7 peoples lives we are choosing to let 1 die.