Tesla Autopilot Chief: Preventing 40 Crashes Per Day For Just 1 Scenario

Ever hit the gas when you intended to pump the brakes? If so, you might have saved yourself a crash if you were driving a Tesla with Autopilot. According to Tesla’s director of Autopilot software Ashok Elluswamy, Tesla is preventing about 40 crashes a day for just this one reason alone.

“Autopilot prevents ~40 crashes/day where human drivers mistakenly press the accelerator at 100% instead of the brakes,” Elluswamy recently tweeted.

Elluswamy’s claim comes just as Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced via Twitter that the company was jacking the price of Full Self Driving from $12,000 to $15,000 in September. (Autopilot is the standard driver assistance package on Teslas that comes bundled with every car; Full Self Driving adds navigation, lane changing, and other features such as Smart Summon.)

If accurate, the claim represents an answer to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration investigation into sudden unintended acceleration complaints from over 100 Tesla drivers, opened in 2020. Tesla has said these incidents are driver error, which has been independently verified for at least one incident.

The claim does raise a few questions:

If Tesla is preventing 40 crashes a day from this one cause of driver error, how many is it preventing from all other sources of driver error, or even circumstances that are out of the driver’s control? And, can Full Self Driving — a very expensive package that has been long promised and often delayed — do even more?

(I’ve asked Tesla those questions and will update this story if the company answers.)

The answers to those questions, of course, need to be balanced with how many accidents the company’s driver assistance technologies either cause or contribute to. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has documented more than 200 crashes with Autopilot or Full Self Driving, and is actively monitoring ADAS, or advanced driver assistance systems.

Tesla has the most crashes of any vehicle manufacturer, but in fairness, the company likely has many more vehicles on the road with high-level ADAS systems than any other competitor, with over 2.6 million Teslas on the road currently and Musk predicting over 4 million by the end of 2022.

There are some encouraging signs.

ADAS-equipped car crashes may be decreasing as systems get better, as the NHTSA data shows a slightly declining trend from July 2021 to May 2022. That’s encouraging, as more and more vehicles with ADAS are driving every week, but more data is needed to prove the trend, particularly month-over-month and season-over-season data.

The NHTSA is continuing to monitor the situation, but Tesla is not waiting. Musk tweeted today that one of his two main goals for 2022 is to fully release Full Self Driving to a wide group of Tesla drivers.