Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (FSD) system is reportedly 26 times safer than the average U.S. driver, according to new data from Bloomberg Intelligence (via @SawyerMerritt).
With supervised Autopilot, Tesla clocks in at just 0.15 accidents per million miles, while the U.S. average sits at a hefty 3.90. That’s a 26x safety edge! Waymo, arguably Tesla’s foremost competitor in the full autonomy game, trails at 1.16. The data is seriously impressive, although it does raise some eyebrows — more on that later.
Tesla’s camera-only FSD, trained on billions of real-world miles, is a stepping stone towards fully autonomous vehicles. Back in 2024, the Journal of Safety Research concluded that supervised Level 2 systems like this can slash crash rates by up to 40% compared to human drivers.
Bloomberg Intelligence’s data does come with a caveat: Tesla’s crash rates were sourced directly from the automaker, which counts any crashes in which Autopilot was deactivated within 5 seconds of impact. Tesla’s data skips injuries and police reports, while Waymo’s doesn’t, which could explain some of the gap between the two.
Still, if this holds, Tesla FSD could be a game-changer for road safety. The staggering reduction in crash rates with supervised FSD also bodes well for the eventual release of unsupervised FSD. Earlier this week, Tesla resumed its FSD rollout in China with version 13.2.9.
