If there was actually a rate of one life threatening accident per 10,000 miles with FSD that would be so obvious it would be impossible to hide. So I have to conclude the cars are actually much safer than that.
I've made this comparison before but student drivers under instructor supervision (with secondary controls) also rarely crash. Are they the best drivers?
I am not a plane pilot but I flew a plane many times while supervised by the pilot. Never took off, never landed, but also never crashed. Am I better than a real pilot or even in any way a competent one?
So much for "Full Self" whatever.
The fact of the technology is that while imperfect, it is absolutely a marvel, and incredibly useful. I will never drive home again after having a beer after work, or when I'm tired after a long day. I can only attribute the angry skepticism in the comments to willful ignorance or lack of in-the-seat experience. I use it everyday, it drives me driveway to parking with only occasional interventions (per week!).
I'll throw in that my wife hates it (as a passenger or driver), but she has a much lower tolerance for any variance from expected human driving behaviour (eg. lane choices, overly cautious behaviour around cars waiting to enter traffic, etc).
Let's hope you never become statistic.
I am happy that FSD is not permitted where I live. I would be concerned to drive close to one. Call it willful ignore if you prefer.
Next to "the latest version really fixed it, for realsies this time", the "anyone who doesn't like it is ignorant or has irrational hate for Tesla" must be the second most sung hymn among a small but entirely too vocal group of Tesla owners. Nothing brings down a conversation as quickly as someone like you, trying to justify your purchase by insulting everyone who doesn't agree with your sunk-cost-fallacy-driven opinions.
I don't have any sunk cost in FSD. The car, sure, but it's a fine electric car that I got when there weren't many options (especially at a reasonable price).
I felt I was being generous. My inclination is that animosity to Musk's odious politics clouds the rational judgement of many critics (and they've mostly have no first-hand experience with FSD for any length of time).
I worry that when it gets to 10,000 mile per incident reliability that it's going to be hard to remind myself I need to pay attention. At which point it becomes a de facto unsupervised system and its reliability falls to that of the autonomous system, rather than the reliability of human + autonomy, an enormous gap.
Of course, I could be wrong. Which is why we need some trusted third party validation of these ideas.
You use professional trained operators with knowledge of the system design and operation using a designed safety plan to minimize prototype risks. At no point should your test plan increase danger to members of the public. Only when you fix problems faster than that test procedure can find do you expand scope.
If you follow the standard automotive pattern, you then expand scope to your untrained, but informed employees using monitored systems. Then untrained employees, informed employees using production systems. Then informed early release customers. Then once you stop being able to find problems regularly at all of those levels do you do a careful monitored release to the general public verifying the safety properties are maintained. Then you finally have a fully released “safe” product.