Elon Musk touts it as the future of driving. But an investigation shows the Tesla autopilot system is far from having an unblemished safety record.

Data show that the number of deaths and serious injuries associated with Autopilot has grown significantly as well.

In June 2022, authorities released a partial account of accidents involving Autopilot, but only three deaths were definitively linked to the technology.

In the most recent data, there have been at least 17 fatal incidents, 11 of them since last May, and five serious injuries.

Elon Musk, Tesla’s CEO, said that vehicles on Autopilot are safer than those driven solely by human drivers. He cited crash rates when comparing the two modes of driving.

The automaker has been urged to develop and deploy features that navigate traffic – navigating stopped school buses, fire engines, stop signs, and pedestrians – arguing that the technology will lead to a safer, accident-free future.

There is no way to determine how many crashes might have been prevented, but the data shows that real-time testing on American roads has clear flaws.

The benefits of installing driver-assistance technologies on Teslas outweigh the risks, Musk has repeatedly argued.

“At the point of which you believe that adding autonomy reduces injury and death, I think you have a moral obligation to deploy it even though you’re going to get sued and blamed by a lot of people,” Musk said last year. “Because the people whose lives you saved don’t know that their lives were saved. And the people who do occasionally die or get injured, they definitely know — or their state does.”