There were a few omissions from the article:
Around the same time, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the nation’s top auto safety regulator, began demanding crash reports from automakers that sell so-called advanced driver assistance systems such as Autopilot. It began releasing those numbers in June. And those numbers don’t look good for Autopilot.
Tesla won’t say why it stopped reporting its safety statistics, which measure crash rates per miles driven.
The NHTSA number is just a raw count of accidents and does not include the odometer miles of each vehicle. In contrast, the Tesla accidents per mile included the NHTSA miles per accident which were an order of magnitude worse. The buried lead later in the article:
Tesla has far more vehicles equipped with driver-assist systems than the competition — an estimated 1 million, Ogan said, about 10 times as many as Ford. All else equal, that would imply Tesla ought to have a NHTSA-reported crash total of 70 since last summer to be comparable with Ford’s rate. Instead, Tesla reported 516 crashes.
That should be "50 times." The article should have given us the numbers at the beginning and end of the interval. This practice is called lying by omission.
For back of the envelop, here are my sources:
https://www.goodcarbadcar.net/tesla-inc-us-sales-figures/
- 1,479,145 - Tesla sales of Oct 2022
Source:
https://getjerry.com/questions/how-many-electric-cars-has-ford-sold
- "(Ford rjw) has already sold almost 30,000 electric vehicles. '
Back of the envelope:
- 49x ~= 1,479,145 / 30,000
So we go further into the LA Times article:
The (raw count rjw)Tesla Autopilot crash numbers are far higher than those of similar driver-assistance systems from General Motors and Ford. Tesla has reported 516 crashes from July 2021 through November 2022, while Ford reported seven and GM two.
The same problem is this is a raw count,
not a count per mile.
If you choose to believe this article, fine by me. I have both AutoPilot and Full Self Driving. AutoPilot paid for itself two months after getting our Tesla when it kept the car in lane and dynamic cruise control safe. Toyota's TSS-P would have driven us into the ditch.
BTW, here is the NHTSA report:
https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/initial-data-release-advanced-vehicle-technologies
https://www.nhtsa.gov/sites/nhtsa.gov/files/2022-06/ADAS-L2-SGO-Report-June-2022.pdf
Bob Wilson