Thread by @yoloption

$TSLA $TSLAQ likes to boast quarterly about how incredibly safe #Autopilot is in their Vehicle Safety Report. The numbers they claim are impressive, but let's look past the grand marketing claims typical of Elon Musk and dig into the numbers. 🧵

First of all, let me just state upfront that I have no doubt that driver assistance features like the dangerously misnamed "Autopilot" do improve safety. Most of those safety features are now widespread, e.g. on your average Toyota Corolla. (BTW, $TM Toyota marketing sucks)

Now where do $TSLA's numbers come from? Their own numbers are self reported and cannot be independently verified. The NHTSA number they quote, "an automobile crash every 484,000 miles", of comes from Overview of Motor Vehicle Crashes (page 3): crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/Pub…

Now this is $TSLA's first marketing sleight of hand: instead of comparing against recent cars driving where #Autopilot can, they use an average of all vehicle types, all road settings. However only ~5% of crashes concern passenger cars driving on highways. cdan.dot.gov/query

70% of the crashes involve cars older than 5 years. The average #Autopilot-capable $TSLA car is less than 2 years old. Speeding is another important factor, as it's the cause of 26% of deaths, and of those 43% occur on interstate/freeway/expressways where adaptive cruise control

can be used. Other technologies commonly found on newer cars such as Forward Collision Warning (FCW), Automatic Emergency Braking (AEB), Lane Departure Warning (LDW), Lane Keeping Assist (LKA) greatly improve safety and could prevent ~60% of crashes injuryfacts.nsc.org/motor-vehicle/…

Here is another study done by the AAA Foundation that estimates that those features could help prevent approximately 40% of all passenger-vehicle crashes. aaafoundation.org/potential-redu…

Again, these features are not unique to $TSLA, with AEB being available on 42% of passenger cars in 2018, FCW on 38%, LDW on 30%, LKA on 24%. The trend is going up quickly. If Tesla wants to prove it's the safest in the world, they should compare themselves against those.

But $TSLA has a long history of deceptive marketing if not outright fraudulent claims. Elon claimed that #Autopilot is already above 99.999999% reliable, which was wrong by a factor of 24

Note: this thread is about #Autopilot, not #FSDBeta. The so-called “march of 9’s” that Elon speaks about has not even started for FSD as #FSDBeta10 videos show that FSD cannot drive autonomously in city streets for more than a few minutes without crashing.

Back in 2017, Elon and Tesla boasted that "Tesla vehicles crash rate dropped by almost 40 percent after Autosteer installation". This was based on a report published by NHTSA at the time, based on data provided by $TSLA.

Independently verifying those findings was impossible as both $TSLA and @NHTSAgov kept the data secret. In 2019, a FOIA lawsuit allowed independent experts to get that data and their conclusion was that NHTSA's analysis was completely bogus. quality-control.us/nhtsa_autopilo…

Not only was the analysis bogus but the independent analysis actually showed the OPPOSITE of what NHTSA/Tesla were claiming, a 59% increase in airbag deployment rate with Autosteer.

The truth will eventually emerge as a recent @NHTSAgov order compels all car manufacturers to report crashes for vehicles with ADS/ADAS features. As usual though, this may take months or years. nhtsa.gov/press-releases…

It should be noted that while Tesla claims to be the leader in autonomous driving, they do not report autonomous driving miles, disengagements, or test results, unlike other players in the AV space. nhtsa.gov/automated-vehi…

$TSLA avoids regulatory scrutiny by telling regulators that all their features, including #FSDBeta, "firmly root the vehicle in SAE Level 2 capability and does not make it autonomous", while telling the public and investors the opposite.

The relentless marketing around #FSD and #Autopilot (a misleading name now banned in Korea and Germany) lulls drivers into a false sense of trust and safety. A recent MIT study shows drivers on Autopilot don't pay as much attention to the road sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

So next time you hear Tesla fans decry any kind of media or regulatory scrutiny around #Autopilot or #FSD, remember that while widely available modern safety features do help prevent crashes and save lives, $TSLA's marketing is mostly smoke and mirrors, and bogus comparisons./end

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