The Tesla Autopilot advanced driver assistance system became safer in the first quarter of 2024, but what about the company's Full Self-Driving (FSD) beta feature?
According to the 2023 Impact Report on page 148, Tesla noted a significantly lower number of crashes with FSD engaged in 2023 than in 2022.
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Tesla's Full Self-Driving Capability
While the Autopilot is an advanced driver assistance system, the Full Self-Driving feature is expected to make the vehicles fully autonomous in the future. However, currently (in the beta stage), Full Self-Driving (just like Autopilot) is intended for use with a fully attentive driver who has their hands on the wheel and is prepared to take over at any moment.
The company reports that the number of vehicular accidents per million miles driven with FSD engaged amounted to 0.21 in 2023. That's a 32% improvement over 0.31 in 2022.
The most recent number is just about 17% higher than in the scenarios when a Tesla drives with Autopilot engaged (0.18 per million miles). The question is whether the ongoing progress of the FSD will soon enable reducing the number of accidents even further to match Autopilot.
It's important to note that both features currently require driver supervision but can't be compared directly because they might be used by different drivers in different weather conditions, on different roads, in different cars, etc.
However, it's good to see that, at least when the FSD feature was used, the number of crashes remained relatively low compared to the U.S. average, estimated at 1.49 accidents per million miles driven.
Number of Vehicular Accidents Per Million Miles Driven
Tesla also reports that vehicular accidents per million miles driven without active safety features worsened by 19%, from 0.68 in 2022 to 0.81 in 2023.
The initial results merely indicate what we will see in the long term once the feature is released as true full self-driving, without driver's supervision, and applied to a wide variety of driving scenarios.
Depending on Tesla's progress, this stat might be an interesting battlefield in man versus machine competition regarding driving safety.
