Tesla Motors's statement last week disclosing the first fatal crash involving its Autopilot automated driving feature opened not with condolences but with statistics. Autopilot's first fatality came after the system had driven people over 130 million miles, the company said, more than the 94 million miles on average between fatalities on U.S. roads as a whole. Soon after, Tesla's CEO and cofounder Elon Musk threw out more figures intended to prove Autopilot's worth in a tetchy e-mail to Fortune (first disclosed yesterday). "If anyone bothered to do the math (obviously, you did not) they would realize that of the over 1M auto deaths per year worldwide, approximately half a million people would have been saved if the Tesla autopilot was universally available," he wrote. Tesla and Musk's message is clear: the data proves Autopilot is much safer than human drivers.

A man has been charged with felony arson after authorities say he threw Molotov cocktails at a Google car parked outside a company building in Mountain View, Calif. Raul Murillo Diaz, 30, threw several beer bottles turned into Molotov cocktails at a Google Street View car parked outside Google's building, prosecutors said, according to NBC Bay Area. While one of the bottles caused a fire, the car did not explode. Diaz told law enforcement he "felt Google was watching him and it made him upset," according to an affidavit. Diaz also told authorities he was involved in two other incidents related to Google, including burning one of Google's self-driving cars, but he has only been charged with one count of arson so far.

Apparently, a crash related to Tesla's autopilot feature was material, before it wasn't. On Tuesday, Fortune reported that Elon Musk and Tesla Motors may have withheld a material fact from shareholders when it failed to disclose that a driver had died using the semi-self driving "autopilot" feature in one of the company's vehicles. The fatal accident, the first known case related to the autopilot feature, occurred 11 days before Musk and Tesla sold 2 billion shares in an offering on May 18. Yet the company made no mention of the crash in its offering documents. The news of the accident didn't come out until last week, when it was reported by federal highway authorities--six weeks after the offering.

This 1947 photo shows an early airplane autopilot system. This 1947 photo shows an early airplane autopilot system. Cars are more maneuverable because of tire design changes. Jet engines are less likely to fail mid-flight thanks to better propulsion mechanics. Clinical diagnoses are more accurate thanks to improvements in medical imaging.

It is Wednesday, July 6. A 300-pound robot is the new security guard at Uber's inspection lot in San Francisco. Here's what else is happening in the Golden State: When undercover CHP officers shot at suspects in a moving car this weekend, they used a tactic that's been outlawed in many major cities because experts believe it's too dangerous. They fired at a moving car. "Only a fool thinks a … bullet is going to stop a 3,800-pound car. Nobody is really shooting at the vehicle, they're shooting at the driver," said Sid Heal, a retired Los Angeles sheriff's commander and chairman of strategy development for the National Tactical Officers Assn.

By rolling out self-driving technology to consumers more aggressively than its competitors, Tesla Motors secured a spot in the forefront of a coming industry. But that strategy could expose the company to a risk it has sought to avoid: liability in crashes. Tesla in 2015 activated its autopilot mode, which automates steering, braking and lane switching. Tesla asserts the technology doesn't shift blame for accidents from the driver to the company. But Google, Zoox and other firms seeking to develop autonomous driving software say it's dangerous to expect people in the driver's seat to exercise any responsibility. Drivers get lulled into acting like passengers after a few minutes of the car doing most of the work, the companies say, so relying on them to suddenly brake when their cars fail to spot a hazard isn't a safe bet.

Last week's fatal crash involving a Tesla Model S offers a startling reminder that driverless technology is still a work in progress. As Tesla's own blog post on the "tragic loss" points out, the autopilot technology that was controlling Joshua Brown's car when it ploughed into a truck is in a "public beta phase". That means the software has been released into the wild to be stress-tested by members of the public so that bugs can be flushed out. It's the kind of approach we are used to seeing when we gain early access to new email applications or virtual reality headsets. As Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak told the New York Times: "Beta products shouldn't have such life-and-death consequences." Until there's been a full investigation into the tragic incident, we won't know whether it was a software glitch or human error (particularly with reports suggesting the driver may have been watching a Harry Potter DVD) at fault.

WASHINGTON – Coalition forces fighting the Islamic State group in northern Syria destroyed one of their own combat drones Tuesday after the unmanned aircraft crashed, the U.S. Air Force said. The MQ-9 Reaper -- a type of armed drone -- crashed while flying a combat mission after remote pilots lost "positive control" of the aircraft, the Air Force said in a statement. "The remotely piloted aircraft crash was not due to enemy fire. There are no reports of civilian injuries or damage to civilian property at the crash site," the statement reads. Coalition craft then destroyed what was left of the drone.

A man who told police he feared surveillance by Google has been arrested and charged with arson after one of the company's self-driving cars was destroyed in an attack in June. Raul Murillo Diaz of Oakland was stopped by police after Google security spotted him driving around the company's headquarters campus in Mountain View, California, just after midnight on June 30. They became suspicious because his car matched that spotted at the scene of several attacks on the company over the preceding six weeks. The first, on May 19, saw several Molotov cocktails thrown at a Google Street View vehicle that was parked in a company lot in Mountain View. The resulting fire didn't damage the car because the bottles bounced off it, but the ground nearby was burnt. A second incident on June 4 occurred late at night when someone fired shots at a Google building in Mountain View.

Someone needed to address the elephant in the room. Mosha, an Asian elephant who lost her right foreleg at just 7 months old when she stepped on a land mine on Thailand's border with Myanmar got her ninth prosthetic limb on June 29, which ended up saving her life. "The way she walked was unbalanced and her spine was going to bend," Dr. Therdchai Jivacate, the orthopedist surgeon who designed the artificial leg, told Reuters. Jivacate made Mosha her first prosthetic leg six years ago when he met her at Friends of the Asian Elephant Foundation when the majestic mammal was 2 and a half. Back then, Mosha weighed 1,300 pounds, now she weighs 4,000 and her artificial legs need to be redesigned to keep up with her growing body.