Tesla Releases Detailed Data on Safety and Performance of Full Self-Driving Software
Tesla has recently provided a comprehensive overview of the performance and safety of its advanced driver-assistance software, following calls from industry leaders for more transparency in data sharing. Just weeks after Waymo’s co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana urged companies to release more information, Tesla has unveiled a new section on its website detailing the performance of its Full Self-Driving (Supervised) software.
According to Tesla’s data, owners using the Full Self-Driving software in North America are driving approximately 5 million miles before a major collision and around 1.5 million miles before a minor collision. These figures represent a significantly lower rate of collisions compared to the national average provided by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), which reports a major collision every 699,000 miles and a minor collision every 229,000 miles.
While Tesla has been regularly releasing vehicle safety reports on a quarterly basis, these reports have been criticized for lacking detail. The company has also been less transparent about the safety performance of its Robotaxi trial in Austin, Texas, where employees still monitor the vehicles from the driver’s seat for safety reasons.
By contrast, Waymo, a leading robotaxi company in the U.S., has published detailed data showing that its vehicles are significantly safer than human drivers, with a 5x lower collision rate and a 12x lower rate with respect to pedestrians. At a recent conference, Mawakana emphasized the importance of transparency in promoting road safety and urged companies to share more data to build trust with the public.
Tesla’s new data reveals that drivers using the Full Self-Driving software travel approximately 2.9 million miles between major collisions, compared to the NHTSA’s reported average of 505,000 miles. For minor collisions, Tesla claims FSD users drive about 986,000 miles between incidents, while the NHTSA data shows an average of 178,000 miles per minor collision for all drivers.
Furthermore, Tesla has provided clear definitions for major and minor collisions, following the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards guidelines. The company defines major collisions as crashes with high-impact severity resulting in airbag deployment, regardless of whether the Full Self-Driving system was active at the time of the incident.
Tesla plans to update this data quarterly, reflecting a rolling twelve-month aggregation of miles and collisions to track recent trends and progress. While the company focuses on objective metrics such as collision frequency and airbag deployment rates, it does not disclose injury rates as this data is automatically collected from the vehicles.
Overall, Tesla’s release of detailed data on the safety and performance of its Full Self-Driving software marks a significant step towards transparency and accountability in the development of autonomous driving technology.
