Second of two partsPart one
As Tesla employees watched videos of FSD’s missteps, the company’s board and CEO ramped up their claims about the technology’s safety and readiness for full autonomy. For much of last year, leaders at Tesla promoted the 10-times-safer claim.
“A car on FSD being 10x safer” will drive sales, Tesla CFO Taneja said in a July earnings call. “Even at $99 a month, it’s like you’re getting a personal chauffeur for almost $3.33 a day.”
A key problem with Tesla’s methodology stems from one comparison error that inflated Tesla’s claimed level of safety by a factor of three. The automaker counted Tesla crashes with airbag deployments and compared them with federal data on all crashes in which a tow-truck removed a vehicle — a far less restrictive criterion. Crashes requiring tow trucks often aren’t severe enough to trigger airbags.
Tesla took this apples-and-oranges approach even though apples were readily available for comparison: The federal data it used included crashes where airbags deployed. This flawed methodology produced the finding that Teslas using FSD or Autopilot travel 10 times farther between crashes than the average human driver.
