One person cannot drive enough miles in their lifetime to allow making a determination that one system is definitely safer than the other. The reliability that we require from an autonomous system means you might never experience a safety failure (again, even if you drive every minute of the rest of your life), but the system is still less safe.
True, but manufacturers can look at aggregate miles traveled and come to some conclusions about the safety of vehicles without any safety systems, with active safety systems like automatic emergency braking, and in Tesla’s case, Autopilot. They publish the statistics regularly and crashes are far less common per million miles driven when autopilot is engaged.
I think these stats aren’t very useful because 1) Tesla drivers are different than other drives as they are rich. Comparing miles driven by rich people to all miles driven isn’t useful for knowing if Teslas are safer; 2) Tesla has really low numbers so it’s hard to compare a small sample to a huge amount. It would be like comparing walking accidents by 7th Day Adventists. They may walk a million miles among the whole population but that’s nothing compared to the trillion miles of the entire population.
The data is not transparent, they publish what they want. How many times drivers intervened? Does Tesla or the fans consider those as a +1 for human and a -1 for the AI in the stats? Nope.
