A note on Tesla's revised safety report crash rates
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.55329/llfl7748Keywords:
Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS), autopilot, crash rate, road safetyAbstract
Between June 2018 and December 2023, Tesla released quarterly safety reports citing average miles between crashes for Tesla vehicles. Prior to March 2021, crash rates were categorized as (1) with their SAE Level 2 automated driving system Autopilot engaged, (2) without Autopilot but with active safety features such as automatic emergency braking, and (3) without Autopilot and without active safety features. In January 2023, Tesla revised past reports to reflect their new categories of with and without Autopilot engaged, in addition to making small adjustments based on recently discovered double counting of reports and excluding previously recorded crashes that did not meet their thresholds of airbag or active safety restraint activation. The revisions are heavily biased towards no-active-safety-features—a surprising result given prior research showing that drivers predominantly keep most active safety features enabled. As Tesla's safety reports represent the only national source of Level 2 advanced driver assistance system crash rates, clarification of their methods is essential for researchers and regulators. This note describes the changes and considers possible explanations for the discrepancies.
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Author Biography
Noah J. Goodall, CET Research, the United States of America
Noah J. Goodall received the Ph.D. degree in civil engineering from the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, USA, in 2013. He is a researcher with CET Research, LLC. His research interests are vehicle automation, intelligent transportation systems, crowdsourced data, and safety.
CRediT contribution: Conceptualization, Formal analysis, Investigation, Methodology, Visualization, Writing—original draft, Writing—review & editing.
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Copyright (c) 2024 Noah J. Goodall
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
