Tesla has released the most detailed look yet at the performance and relative safety of its advanced driver-assistance software. This comes just a few weeks after Waymo’s co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana called on companies to release more safety data at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference.
On a new section of its website, Tesla claims that in North America, owners using the company’s Full Self-Driving (Supervised) software drive approximately 5 million miles before experiencing a major collision and around 1.5 million miles before a minor collision. Tesla states this is a far lower rate than the national average based on statistics from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. According to Tesla’s interpretation, NHTSA data shows people get in a major collision every 699,000 miles and a minor one every 229,000 miles.
Tesla has been releasing quarterly vehicle safety reports for some time, but these reports have been repeatedly criticized for being insufficient. The company has also released almost no information about the safety performance of its ongoing Robotaxi trial in Austin, Texas, where employees remain in the driver’s seat for monitoring.
Waymo, a leading robotaxi company in the U.S., has published detailed data showing its vehicles are around five times safer than human drivers and twelve times safer with respect to pedestrians. At last month’s Disrupt conference, Mawakana was asked to name other companies she felt were making roads safer. She responded that she did not know who was on that list because they are not sharing data about their fleets. Mawakana added that there is a responsibility for companies to be transparent if they are putting vehicles on the road without a driver behind the wheel. She stated that if a company is not being transparent, then it is not doing what is necessary to earn the right to make the road safer.
One repeated criticism of Tesla’s past safety reports is that they focused on Autopilot, a less advanced system than Full Self-Driving. Autopilot is designed for highway use, which typically has a lower crash rate. Tesla has now broken out the data for its more advanced system. The new website claims that drivers using Full Self-Driving travel about 2.9 million miles between major collisions, while NHTSA data shows all drivers travel about 505,000 miles per major collision. For minor collisions, Tesla claims Full Self-Driving users drive about 986,000 miles between incidents, compared to the NHTSA average of 178,000 miles.
Tesla is also defining its terms for the first time. The carmaker is using Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards. Tesla defines major collisions as crashes with higher-severity impacts where a vehicle’s airbags or other non-reversible pyrotechnic restraints are deployed. The company also states that if Full Self-Driving was active at any point within five seconds leading up to a collision, it includes that crash in its dataset. This calculation ensures the reported collision rates capture not only collisions that occur while the system is actively controlling the vehicle, but also scenarios where a driver may disengage the system or where the system aborts on its own shortly before impact.
In its FAQ section, Tesla states it will update the data every quarter, reflecting a rolling twelve-month aggregation of miles and collisions to remain relevant to recent trends. The company says it will not release other information, such as injury rates, because it collects data automatically from the vehicles. Instead, Tesla focuses on objective metrics like collision frequency and airbag deployment rates, which serve as a reliable proxy for collision severity.