It turns out that a heavily cited safety stat that Tesla received from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) back in 2017 isn’t so accurate.
Following a deadly Tesla crash involving Autopilot, Tesla’s semi-autonomous advanced driver assistance system, a 2017 federal report found that Autopilot led to a 40 percent crash reduction. But last week a small research group finally obtained most of the data NHTSA used to reach that number and found the underlying data was severely flawed.
The discovery confirms what the group, Quality Control Systems Corp., and others like this report from Wired last May. People had been skeptical for a long time. Even NHTSA said last year the numbers weren’t as solid as they had originally indicated. The QCS researchers wrote in their report, “Remarkably, NHTSA’s announcement was not accompanied by any of the data underlying this astonishing claim.” So back in 2017 they requested the data and successfully fought for access. Read more…