Tesla's Favorite Autopilot Safety Statistic Doesn't Hold Up

For more than a year, Tesla has defended its semiautonomous Autopilot as a vital, life-saving feature. CEO Elon Musk has lambasted journalists who write about crashes involving the system. "It's really incredibly irresponsible of any journalists with integrity to write an article that would lead people to believe that autonomy is less safe," he said during a tumultuous earnings call this week. "Because people might actually turn it off, and then die." This wasn't the first time Musk has made this argument about Autopilot, which keeps the car in its lane and a safe distance from other vehicles but requires constant human oversight, and has been involved in two fatal crashes in the US. "Writing an article that's negative, you're effectively dissuading people from using autonomous vehicles, you're killing people," he said on an October 2016 conference call.