The Fatal Collisions Between Tesla and Autonomy in the United States, as Revealed by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration

The NHTSA investigated almost 1000 crashes starting in January and going all the way until August 2023. Of those crashes, some of which involved other vehicles striking the Tesla vehicle, 29 people died. There were more than a hundred crashes in which the plane of the electric car struck a vehicle. These crashes were often the most severe — of these crashes, 14 people died, and 49 were injured.

Drivers using Autopilot or the system’s more advanced sibling, Full Self-Driving, “were not sufficiently engaged in the driving task,” and Tesla’s technology “did not adequately ensure that drivers maintained their attention on the driving task,” NHTSA concluded.

“If you’ve got, at scale, a statistically significant amount of data that shows conclusively that the autonomous car has, let’s say, half the accident rate of a human-driven car, I think that’s difficult to ignore,” Musk said. “Because at that point, stopping autonomy means killing people.”

These fatal crashes killed 14 people and injured 49, according to data collected and published by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the federal road-safety regulator in the US.

When a car crashes into an obstacle directly in its path, it’s called a frontal plane; at least half of the other crashes are closely examined by government engineers. That’s enough time that an attentive driver should have been able to prevent or at least avoid the worst of the impact, government engineers concluded.

Regulators concluded that even the Autopilot product name was a problem, encouraging drivers to rely on the system rather than collaborate with it. The report said automotive competitors use “assist,” “sense,” or “team” language because their systems aren’t designed to drive themselves.