Tesla Publishes First Quarterly Vehicle Safety Report

There's been a lot of talk about Tesla's car crashes and the company has been responding to individual queries by the media but it now looks like the company is ready to set the records straight. Tesla said in a statement that it would start reporting safety numbers each quarter, detailing the frequency of Tesla crashes and the first report has been published by the company.

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The company said that because every Tesla is connected, in most instances it is able to learn immediately when a Tesla vehicle has been involved in a crash. Taking a dig at other manufacturers Tesla stated that its non-traditional sales model allows it to have a direct relationship with customers for the lifecycle of ownership while other manufacturers utilised networks of third-party franchised dealers may never know when a vehicle is involved in an accident.

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The company said that over the past quarter, it registered one accident or crash-like event for every 3.34 million miles driven in which drivers had Autopilot engaged. It further stated that for those driving without Autopilot, the company registered one accident or crash-like event for every 1.92 million miles driven. By comparison, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's (NHTSA) most recent data showed that in the United States, there is an automobile crash every 492,000 miles.

While NHTSA's data includes accidents that have occurred, Tesla's records include accidents as well as near misses (crash-like events).

Earlier this year, Tesla made the decision to begin publishing our safety data on a regular basis, we designed and introduced a completely new telemetry stream for our vehicles to facilitate these reports. This new data stream allows us to gather the most critical fleet-wide statistics from the exact moment a crash-related event is detected by our system. While there are still some unique cases in which crash data may not be available to us through this channel, we believe this system currently provides the best framework for safety reporting on an ongoing basis.