Tesla released the most detailed look yet at the performance and relative safety of its advanced driver assistance software, just weeks after Waymo co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana at TechCrunch Disrupt called on the companies to release more data.
In one new section of her websiteTesla claims that in North America, owners using the company’s Full Self-Driving (Supervised) software drive about 5 million miles before a major crash and about 1.5 million miles before a minor crash.
This is a much lower rate than the national average based on statistics provided by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). This data shows that humans have a major collision every 699,000 miles and a minor one every 229,000, at least according to Tesla’s interpretation.
Tesla has been publishing “vehicle safety reports” quarterly for a while. But these reports were repeatedly panning because it is insufficient. And Tesla has released almost no information about the safety performance of this year’s Robotaxi test in Austin, Texas, which still has employees in the driver’s seat for safety reasons.
Waymo, the leading robotaxi company in the US right now based on the cars it develops and the customers it serves, has published detailed data showing that its vehicles are approximately 5 times safer than human drivers and 12 times safer than pedestrians. At the Disrupt conference last month, Mawakana was asked to name other companies he felt were making the roads safer.
“I don’t know who’s on that list because they don’t tell us what’s going on with their fleets,” Mawakana said, without naming Tesla.
“I think there’s a responsibility, if you’re going to put vehicles on the road and you’re going to take the driver away from the wheel and you’re going to have someone in another room watching the fleet who can take over their vehicles, it’s up to you to be transparent about what’s going on,” he added. “And if you’re not transparent, then I think you’re not doing what’s necessary to really earn the right to make the road safer.”
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Waymo did not immediately respond to a request for comment Friday about whether Mawakana believes Tesla’s new data is sufficient.
One of the repeated criticisms of Tesla’s quarterly safety reports is that it focused on Autopilot, a far less advanced driver assistance system than its Full Self Driving (Supervised), or FSD, software — which, despite its name, does not make a car fully autonomous. Autopilot was designed for use on highways, where a lower accident rate (when minor collisions are included) is typically seen.
Tesla has finally revealed all this data. The new section of Tesla’s website claims that drivers using FSD travel about 2.9 million miles between major crashes, while NHTSA data shows that all drivers travel about 505,000 miles per major crash. Tesla claims FSD users drive about 986,000 miles between minor collisions, while NHTSA data shows all drivers travel about 178,000 miles per minor collision.
Tesla is also finally showing how it defines these terms for the first time.
The automotive industry uses the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards, specifically 49 CFR § 563.5. Tesla defines “major crashes” as higher-severity impact accidents where a vehicle’s airbags “or other irreversible pyrotechnic restraint systems” deploy. The company also says that if FSD was active “at any point within five seconds before a crash event,” then it includes that error in that data set.
“This calculation ensures that the reported crash rates for FSD (Supervised) capture not only crashes that occur while the system is actively controlling the vehicle, but also scenarios where a driver can disengage the system or where the system aborts itself shortly before impact,” says Tesla.
In the FAQ section, Tesla states that it will update the data quarterly and that it will “reflect a rolling twelve-month accumulation of miles and collisions in an effort to remain relevant to recent trends and progress.” The company says it won’t release other information, such as injury rates, because it collects that data automatically from the vehicles.
“Instead, Tesla focuses on objective and programmatic metrics such as crash frequency and air bag deployment rates. Air bag deployment serves as a reliable indicator of crash severity,” the company writes.
