In the nine months between March 2023 and December 2023 the cumulative miles driven by Full Self-Driving increased by 625 million miles – approximately 833 million miles per year. Full Self-Driving was covering approximately 2,082 miles per customer in this period. Data from the Federal Highway Administration shows that the average American drives 14,263 miles. Therefore, FSD is only engaged in approximately 14.6% of the mileage covered by customers who purchased the software for up to $15,000.
Furthermore, on its website, Tesla claims Autopilot only crashes once every 5.5 million miles, whereas the Department of Transportation statistics show that human drivers crash every 0.5 million miles and conclude that this means that Autopilot is 11 times safer than a human.
This is a completely false conclusion because Tesla defines a “crash” very differently than the DoT: Tesla excludes all crashes where the airbags did not deploy.
The number of accidents is of course much higher than the number of crashes where the airbags deployed.