But a recent study by the Washington Post shows that since 2019, there have been 736 crashes directly linked to Autopilot, including 17 fatalities. These statistics have raised questions about how safe the driverless system is.
Tesla’s creator, Elon Musk, insists the system is safe and that he had a "moral obligation" to deploy it.
"At the point of which you believe that adding autonomy reduces injury and death, I think you have a moral obligation to deploy it even though you’re going to get sued and blamed by a lot of people," Musk said last year. "Because the people whose lives you saved don’t know that their lives were saved. And the people who do occasionally die or get injured, they definitely know — or their state does."
But former NHTSA senior safety adviser Missy Cummings, a professor at George Mason University’s College of Engineering and Computing, isn’t so sure.
"Tesla is having more severe — and fatal — crashes than people in a normal data set," she said in response to the figures analyzed by the Post. She said that one likely cause is the expanded rollout over the past year and a half of Full Self-Driving. This brings driver assistance to city and residential streets. "The fact that ... anybody and everybody can have it. ... Is it reasonable to expect that might be leading to increased accident rates? Sure, absolutely."