alt Hacker News> AI has been demonstrated to be able to save lives in the case of driving assists in electric cars and the numbers are undeniable. AI can help lend some of that to warfare as well.
> Doesn't that sound like a well rounded reasonable approach to the issue? We just don't know.
We could know. It's basic math to subtract the number of lives saved from the number of people killed by driving assists in electric cars, which would give you a "savior quotient" for the technology as a whole. The data is well-preserved for this application: https://www.tesladeaths.com/
Of course, the number wouldn't be very flattering, and would probably undermine your point. Then we'd be back around to "just a few more years until the tech matures" like we were back in the promissory days of FSD.
I never mentioned Tesla and I don't know about their specifics, but my point stands as correct. The average fatalities per 100 million miles driven in the US is between 1.1 and 1.3. The worst case estimate for Tesla was something like 0.56 and that was excluding data about resulting pedestrian or motorcycle deaths (which are a significant number of all related automotive fatalities). So driver assistance technologies that help avoid running over some pedestrian are not represented. It is not denied that Tesla is safer than other brands and a few poorly worded or titled articles won't change that.
The website you linked isn't useful, since that's not a reliable way to collect crash data and even then I'm not sure the website supports your claim given that they had sold 9 million Teslas by the latest reported data on their table and in that entire time over 12 years they only recorded 772 deaths. Again, I wouldn't trust their data, but I'm not convinced the data they do have supports your claim.
If you normalize for car type, weight class and include all fatalities involved in a wreck (not only the occupants of the vehicle, which means including pedestrians, motorcyclists or the occupants of other vehicles) the relative safety of a lot of these cars is so much better than older cars now that you essentially get into the range of noise. In statistics so low they blend into noise, you are getting closer to having to use a crystal ball to understand driver psychology and behavior rather than the car itself.
Regardless of Tesla (which was actually the subject of political activist attacks and thus heavy propaganda against it), there are reliable statistics and studies that support these driver assist and even automated driving technologies as provably life saving:
https://www.mitre.org/sites/default/files/2025-01/PR-25-0114...
https://www.iihs.org/news/detail/safety-benefits-stack-up-fr...
https://electriccarsreport.com/2026/07/waymo-driverless-cars...