No Technology -- Not Even Tesla's Autopilot -- Can Be Completely Safe

When I read the headlines Friday about the fatal crash of a Tesla vehicle while in self-driving mode, I immediately thought about Three Mile Island. It's not that Tesla's autopilot mode is the vehicular equivalent of a nuclear meltdown. As the company would very much like you to note, self-driving cars are doing better, statistically speaking, than human drivers. Tesla says autopilot was used for 130 million miles worth of driving before this fatal crash. Human-driven cars in the U.S. have 1.08 fatal crashes for every 100 million miles.