Richard Probst

I wanted to prove FSD is safer than human drivers. Genuinely. I went to the data expecting to find the number everyone quotes: one accident per six million miles on FSD versus one per 670,000 for humans. Nine times safer. Case closed. The claim cannot be made. Not "the data is weak." The comparison itself does not exist. Start with the equipment. The "human driver" baseline is every car on American roads, and the average American car is over twelve years old. That baseline includes bald tires, worn brake pads, cracked mirrors, and drivers with no emergency braking, no blind spot warning, no lane keeping. A modern Tesla is a rolling sensor suite with the best crash-avoidance hardware ever sold to consumers. So I went looking for the honest comparison: FSD miles versus miles in comparable modern EVs with the same braking, comparable sensors, comparable warning systems. That dataset does not exist in any usable form. Nobody publishes it. Tesla certainly doesn't. Then the miles themselves. FSD engagement is self-selected. Drivers turn it on in good weather, in daylight, on roads they trust it with. The owner's manual itself warns the system "may not operate as intended" in rain, snow, fog, and low light, which happen to be the conditions where humans crash most. So the FSD number is computed over the easiest miles in the newest cars with the richest, most insured drivers, while the human number absorbs every drunk at 3am and every teenager in a beater. And it's supervised. Every mile in the FSD column had a human babysitter whose interventions, whose saves, get credited to the machine. The comparison isn't machine versus human. It's machine-plus-human versus human alone, with all credit assigned to the machine. Darrell Huff described this exact move in How to Lie with Statistics in 1954: if you can't prove what you want to prove, demonstrate something else and pretend they are the same thing. Rolf Dobelli in "Art of Thinking Clearly" calls the other half of it the swimmer's body illusion: swimmers have great bodies because bodies select swimmers. Teslas crash less because new luxury cars with safety suites driven by affluent middle-aged owners crash less. Selection, not software. When Forbes decomposed Tesla's own 2020 report by road type, the Autopilot advantage shrank to about four percent, inside the margin of error. Tesla has refused every request since to release the breakdown. So here is where I landed. I wanted the claim to be true and provable. It is neither provable nor disprovable with the data that exists. The honest sentence is "we don't know." Anyone who tells you FSD is statistically safer than humans is guessing. Anyone who tells you it's statistically more dangerous is also guessing. The difference is that only one of those guesses is attached to a stock price, a monthly subscription, and a man telling you the feature will be finished next year, every year, since 2016. When someone quotes you the nine-times-safer figure, ask one question: compared to whom, driving what, in what weather, measured by whom? The silence is the answer.