- Ninety-five people are believed to have died as a result of Tesla catching fire or using autopilot.
- Autopilot-related deaths have increased since the company expanded Tesla’s full self-driving beta.
- Tesla says there are 0.2 Autopilot crashes per million miles, compared to 1.5 for the U.S. average.
Tesla has earned some accolades for pushing electric and self-driving cars to new heights, but its cars have also been implicated in hundreds of fatal accidents.
A total of 393 people died in accidents involving Tesla, according to the Tesla death database, which cited news articles and reports from the U.S. Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
A large part of this figure is made up of pile-ups, drunk drivers, medical emergencies, and other crashes that can happen to any Tesla model.
But as many as 95 people died in Tesla vehicles that caught fire or were on autopilot, according to reports collated by online databases. That’s nearly one in four deaths associated with Elon Musk’s EV brand.
Based on an analysis of 2019 NHTSA data, The Washington Post reported that 17 people died in a total of 736 crashes involving Tesla’s autopilot features. However, this excludes older cases, cases from outside the United States, and some reports. The latest data from NHTSA revealed.
Thirty-five people have died in incidents involving Tesla’s autopilots, according to the Tesla Fatalities Database.
A Tesla damaged in a fatal crash.
Jeff Gritchen/Digital First Media/Orange County Register via Getty Images
In 2016, the first known death involving a self-driving car was when a Tesla Model S failed to stop and crashed into a semi-trailer truck.
In a 2019 incident in Indiana, a 23-year-old woman was killed when her husband’s Tesla car crashed into a parked fire truck, but NHTSA was using both autopilot and traffic-aware cruise control. , not sure if you were only using the latter.
And in 2020 in Norway, a man standing next to a truck was run over by a Tesla and died.
A total of 62 people died in Tesla fires, two of which involved Autopilot.
For example, in 2022, an NHTSA report said that in Colorado, the autopilot of a Tesla Model 3 accidentally sent the car off the road and crashed into a tree, then caught fire.
Autopilot-related accidents have increased dramatically in recent years, with three-quarters of the 35 fatal crashes occurring since 2020.
There have been 18 fatalities involving Autopilot Teslas, or about half of the seven-year fatalities, since early 2022.
The interior of the Tesla Model S is shown in autopilot mode.
Reuters/Alexandria Sage/File Photo
This seems to be the case since the rapid expansion of Tesla’s FSD beta feature rollout. The company said late last year that Tesla’s features were in 400,000 vehicles, up from 12,000 just over a year ago.
But statistics released by the company show that cars are far safer than the average U.S. car, and are getting safer.
Tesla announced that in the fourth quarter of 2022, its vehicles using Autopilot had a record 1 crash every 4.85 million miles, or 0.2 crashes every million miles. bottom. By comparison, a Tesla without Autopilot has about 0.7 crashes per million miles, and the U.S. average has 1.5 crashes per million miles. The company does not release figures such as fatalities per million miles or the total number of miles driven for that calculation.