But it’s possible that Autopilot is more dangerous off the freeway and a bit safer on it.

In addition, we’re (slightly) presuming that Autopilot drivers have similar ratios of accidents between highway and street, but this does not affect things much since Autopilot is so rarely used on city streets. Indeed, the wild swings in the numbers published by Tesla suggest that there’s a lot of randomness in the results - they’re probably not varying this much in quality. In fact, the margin of error is large enough that even the other quarters could be roughly equal, though the general trend seems to rate Autopilot as slightly less safe than not using it. 4% is really within the margin of error, so this quarter, the numbers can be considered roughly equal. Tesla will know the real rates on the different types of road but has declined multiple requests to provide them. Turn Autopilot off and you go 5.37 million highway miles between accidents (4% better.) This is just an estimate based on data we have. Combine those together (in the 94-6 ratio) and you get Tesla’s number of “once per 4.59 million” total miles. (The 3:1 ratio is derived from fatalities, I am still seeking more accurate data on all crashes.)įortunately, crashes in Tesla are fairly rare dpa/picture alliance via Getty Imagesįor the Q3 2020 report, that means that driving the highway with Autopilot, you see an accident every 5.15 million highway miles, but every 1.7 million city miles.

Highways are much simpler to drive (that’s why Autopilot is limited to them) and while the accidents can be more severe there are far fewer of them. (That’s less highway than most cars do because of drivers turning on Autopilot.) Most importantly, accident rates per mile are around 3 times higher on city streets than on highways. Non-Autopilot driving is a mix of 40% highway and 60% city streets. (In fact, officially Tesla only approves of using it on highways.) The new “FSD” product being beta tested by a few users is intended to do the same thing on city streets. The problem is, this is what you would expect, because according to research at MIT, 94% of Autopilot use is on limited access highways. By comparison, NHTSA’s most recent data shows that in the United States there is an automobile crash every 479,000 miles.”Īt first reading, the Autopilot number looks almost twice as good as the non-Autopilot number. For those driving without Autopilot and without our active safety features, we registered one accident for every 1.79 million miles driven. For those driving without Autopilot but with our active safety features, we registered one accident for every 2.42 million miles driven. The government is already working on identifying these accident prone areas across the country and revamping these roads in a bid to make it safer.“In the 3rd quarter, we registered one accident for every 4.59 million miles driven in which drivers had Autopilot engaged. Similarly, such initiatives need to be taken on other highways as well such as the Agra - Lucknow Expressway that too witnesses similar situation during winter.

For heavy vehicles, the speed limit has been reduced to 60 kmph as they take more time to stop due to their mass. Poor visibility leads to fatal accidents and long pilings of rammed cars on the expressway and as a preventive measure, the Yamuna Expressway Industrial Development Authority (YEIDA) has decided to lower the speed limit from 100 kmph to 80 kmph on the Expressway during the winter season. The Yamuna Expressway connecting Greater Noida and Agra becomes one of the major accident prone during winter. The authorities need to identify more such stretches across the country and take preventive measures like revising speed limits, fixing blind spots and even out extreme undulations on these roads which are few of the major reasons of road accidents.Īlso Read: Speed Limit On Yamuna Expressway To Be Lowered To 80 KMPH From December 15 In fact, 62 per cent of these accidents were recorded on just 5 per cent stretch of the highways, hinting that preventive measures need to be taken to reduce accidents on these stretches. In 2022, there were 1,55,622 deaths due to road accidents were registered in India and 59.7 per cent of fatalities occurred due to over-speeding.

Car accident rate manual vs automatic