Just this week, Tesla announced a tie-in for their Tesla Insurance product, offering a discount for heavy users of the Full Self Driving (ˢᵘᵖᵉʳᵛᶦˢᵉᵈᵎ) advanced driving assistance system.
Drivers can save up to 10% on their Tesla Insurance premium if they drive 50%+ of their miles with FSD mode active (and presumably, supervised).
No Good Safety Data
Typically, insurance companies offer discounts to drivers with fewer accidents who opt into dystopian data-tracking systems, like State Farm’s “Drive Safe & Save Discount.” There are plenty of others, like Geico’s DriveEasy module in their mobile app, which measures your “safe driving habits” among other things.
Interestingly, Tesla makes no such claim of safety for their L2 “Advanced Driver Assistance System.” Just that they’ll discount your rate if you use FSD heavily. That’s probably because Tesla is famously reluctant to share their autonomous driving safety data.
Compare to Waymo, who just announced that an independent insurance study of their vehicles touted their vehicles as 12X safer than human drivers.
Update: It took some digging, but Tesla has publicly commented on their FSD system’s safety versus human drivers. On their recent Q4 2024 earnings call, Ashok Elluswamy stated that it was “like 8.5 times safer.”
The referenced “Vehicle Safety Report” is two bar graphs on the Tesla website, available here. Thin gruel for us gearheads who are used to datalogging tuners! Until I understand the in-depth data and methodology better, I’m skeptical.
NHTSA has Probing Questions
The good news is that when an automaker refuses to share their data, we have government regulators to fill in the gaps. The NHTSA launched a probe late last year after no fewer than 4 FSD crashes came to the regulator’s attention, including one fatality. That is, of course, separate from the NHTSA probe launched earlier this year into Tesla’s Automatic Smart Summon (ASS).
If you’re giggling, that says more about you than about me. This is an occasionally serious publication.
So, suffice it to say, at FuelArc News, we are going to withhold judgement on the relative safety of Tesla’s FSD system… other than to stand by our previous coverage of drivers reporting that Cybertruck FSD can’t reliably see pedestrians.
While any normal insurer offering discounts would suggest that the autonomous technology was likely to result in fewer accidents, it’s harder to say with Tesla Insurance offering a discount on vertically integrated products like FSD. After all, they might just soak the cost of any accidents with the FSD subscription fees.
