Lurk, the total fleet mileage hit 10 billion miles in Nov last year. Also Tesla hit 1bn miles on Autopilot las year.
Source was
Electret.
According to
Wikipedia, the Model S death rate, whilst on Autopilot, is 2 and the Model X death rate, whilst driving on Autopilot is 1. This seems to match with the 320m mile claim by Tesla, if they are talking about Autopilot only.
Out of 1bn road miles driven, that is not high.
I can't find the total Tesla death rate for all models, however, if
this article is right and we are talking about only 8 fatalities in 10bn road miles across the whole fleet, then the fatality rate is somewhere around one fatality every 1 1/4 billion miles. Which means that Musk's tweet that Autopilot is safer than human control is not quite fitting. But you would need to drill down into the details to see why. Apples for Oranges comparisons being one. Like the driver who was crushed by a block of concrete, for one, or comparing highway driving with billions of miles in city commute driving.
The bigger issue with Autopilot is that, in every fatality case, the driver ignored warnings to pay attention. Autopilot is not a self driving technology, it is a driver assistance technology. Waymo, on auditing their drivers, found that level2/3 systems were being abused as if they were full level 4/5 self driving systems. Leading Waymo to the conclusion that you can't trust humans to drive cars in any situation, assisted or otherwise. Humans always push the rules and suffer the consequences.
Why do I think this is "on topic"? The success, or eventual failure, of Tesla will be driven by their ability to keep on the disruptive technology curve. It gives them an edge with technology people want to own and use. If Tesla can't make a compelling business case for the technology in their vehicles being far ahead of the competition, then their "brand image" will start to slide and Tesla does not have enough margin (yet), to slug it out with the incumbents on a level playing field.
The best thing for Tesla, today, is that the incumbents are spending more than half their time trying to work out how to protect the ICE revenues (which are keeping them afloat), whilst moving the customer base to EV.
In short, incumbent vehicle manufacturers don't want their EV's to be significantly better than their ICE's because they can't produce enough of them to fulfil that level of demand, once created and could lose even more customers to Tesla.
Tesla, on the other hand, has only one way to go. Up. Driven by every piece of technology and perceived benefit they can sell.
Musk, as usual, is saying one thing whilst providing insufficient data to see the whole picture as it is. As usual, Musk will probably be proven correct in the end, but only by diving into such minute hair splitting as is only enjoyed by financial auditors or lawyers.
In broad he is correct. Tesla's have a better safety record than the average car fleet. Which is around 11 years old.
What those who campaign on vehicle safety fail to acknowledge is that the very largest falls in deaths on the roads have already been seen. They were achieved with seat belts. Everything else has been incremental and speed is the biggest red herring of all. The next largest fall in deaths on the roads will happen when humans are no longer driving the vehicles. But I won't see that fully in my life time.
