Tesla Autopilot and FSD are now 6x safer than human drivers who turn them off to text from their phones

During Tesla's last quarterly call, Elon Musk broke the news that a fleet of its own vehicles will debut the company's unsupervised FSD feature in Austin, TX this June.

These will most likely be newly minted 2026 Model Y Juniper and Model 3 units with AI4 (Hardware 4.0) kits and an FSD 13 version update that will allow them to move around on city streets without a driver inside.

This will be the pilot test fleet of the paid Robotaxi ride-share service that will let current Tesla owners, as well as the two-seat Cybercabs, hop on the platform next year.

To get permission for unsupervised FSD, i.e. one that doesn't need a driver in the car, however, Tesla will need to demonstrate that its autonomous driving systems are safer than a human, even in states with lax regulatory framework like Texas.

This might be why, shortly before the earnings call, Tesla's AI team announced the latest Autopilot and FSD safety statistics that Elon Musk then quoted before investors:

In the 4th quarter, we recorded one crash for every 5.94 million miles driven in which drivers were using Autopilot technology. For drivers who were not using Autopilot technology, we recorded one crash for every 1.08 million miles driven. By comparison, the most recent data available from NHTSA and FHWA (from 2023) shows that in the United States there was an automobile crash approximately every 702,000 miles.

Of course, those stats don't distinguish between city and highway miles and Elon said that the cars are 8x safer than humans calculating the ratio with the NHTSA numbers rather than the 6x safety advantage ratio that comes from Tesla's own Autopilot miles comparison.

In any case, Elon said that humans driving with FSD on now have to actually disengage it to check their messages or emails, so they'd welcome the launch of unsupervised FSD, even owners of older Teslas that will be upgraded to a HW4 computer for free if they bought FSD. "We're in this perverse situation where people will turn the car off autopilot, so the computer doesn't yell at them, check the text messages while steering the car with their knee and not looking out the window," explained Musk.

Asked when does he expect unsupervised FSD to roll out en masse after the Austin pilot in June, Elon said that the US will be on track for the feature this year, then China and Europe should follow by the end of 2026.

In Europe the challenges are mostly regulatory, he explained, as the Commission's bodies meet to decide on such features at certain intervals, while in China it is largely geopolitics and the complex local road rules that are an obstacle.

Then in China, which is a gigantic market, we do have some challenges because they weren't, currently allow us to transfer training video outside of China. And then the US government wouldn't let us do training in China. So we're in a bit of a bind there. So like, bit of a quandary. So we are already solving then is by literally looking at videos of streets in China that are available on the Internet to understand and then feeding that into our video training so that publicly available video of street signs and traffic rules in China can be used for training and then also putting it in a very accurate simulator. And so it will train using SIM for bus lanes in China. Like bus lanes in China, by the way, were about the biggest challenges in making FSD work in China is the bus lanes are very complicated. And there's like literally like hours of the day that you're allowed to be there and not be there. And then if you accidentally go in that bus lane at the wrong time, you get an automatic ticket instantly. So, it's kind of a big deal, bus lanes in China. So we're going to put that into our simulator, train on that. The car has to know what time of day it is, read the sign. Anyway, we'll get this solved.

While in China Tesla has a lot of competition coming up with their own driver-assist solutions that let their cars visit battery swap stations and change their packs themselves, for instance, or even already operating robotaxis there, Europe and the US will be prime for the unsupervised FSD taking.

Whether that will translate into the breathtaking earnings from the self-driving technology that Elon has been predicting for Tesla and the owners of its cars for years now, remains to be seen.

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