Elon Musk's estimate that Tesla Autopilot could save 500,000 lives worldwide doesn't make sense

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.