Tesla Removed Autopilot. The Data Says Safety Wasn’t Lost - CleanTechnica

The article discusses Tesla's recent removal of Autopilot and Autosteer as standard features in North America, initially perceived by the author as a potential step back for safety and a move to push the Full Self Driving subscription. While Autopilot has been widely regarded as a safety-enhancing feature that reduces driver workload and smooths control, the author emphasizes that such assumptions require rigorous testing through large-scale, independent data rather than relying on driver perception or small datasets. Traffic safety outcomes like fatalities are extremely rare events (about one per 100 million miles), making it difficult to draw confident conclusions from limited data due to the "law of small numbers," where small samples can produce misleading results dominated by randomness. The author highlights the challenge of evaluating Autopilot’s safety using Tesla’s own published statistics, which compare crash rates with and without Autopilot engagement. These statistics are not independently verified and lack normalization for important factors such as road type, driver behavior, and exposure context. Since Autopilot