More accurately stated, statistics can be manipulated by the deceptive to convey a false impression to the credulous/ignorant, whereas overstressed CEOs with everything to loose can and do order this to happen.
Also, sadly, it is entirely unsafe to assume "
every AP caused fatality is reported in the media" or indeed by the company: in fact Tesla for around 2 years suppressed information on the first AP fatality in China [Jan.2016] by pretending they could not [remotely] determine if the car had been in Autopilot, although it is clear from its perfectly-centred trajectory to doom in the dashcam footage immediately recovered from the wreckage, as you can see for yourself linked in my comment above. It was only long after the hullabaloo over the Florida decapitation [May 2016] had died down [pun unintended] that this China incident became more widely known and Tesla finally admitted the accident had happened under Autopilot [
Tesla confirms 'Autopilot' engaged in fatal crash in China ]. Which retroactively rendered Musk's rearguard claim at the time of Brown's demise [
A Tragic Loss ], that his was "
the first known fatality in just over 130 million miles where Autopilot was activated. Among all vehicles in the US, there is a fatality every 94 million miles.” as patently false and IMHO purposefully deceptive, as it was designed to lead the public and investigating authorities to rationalise "Oh well, this system is at least as safe as the average human driver, which, despite this one-off mess-up, is actually an amazing achievement!"
In reality, however, Brown was the second AP fatality in 130 million AP miles, making its score 1:65M, compared to 1:94M for the humans, i.e. quite a bit worse than the average driver, which anyhow is a rather unambitious marker against which to measure, and again conveniently omits the consideration that off-highway accidents are more frequent, which must further skew the result against AP.
But this was not then "known" to the wider public, i.e. proven against or admitted by Tesla at that time, nor was the Chinese driver Gao Yaning strictly speaking a Tesla "customer", but rather the son of one, who had borrowed the car from his pop for a spin. So maybe with a close enough parsing of the PR a corporate shyster will get his employer Musk off the legal hook for this sleight-of-hand, should it ever come up, which it has not, but that does not make it right or decent conduct.
Furthermore, the same deceptive company habits seem to continue to this very day in other cases, such as that in Switzerland from May 10, 2018, wherein a German businessman driving home alone in the daytime slammed his Model S into a motorway construction zone barricade at high speed, flipping the car and comprehensively cremating himself
in situ:
Swiss prosecutors investigate fatal Tesla crash | Reuters
Precious little mention of this in the ensuing 7 months: no blog post nor even a full name for this forgotten statistic. Are we thus to presume he was *not* "
a friend to Tesla", did *not* have "
a loving family"? Judging from the photo it is fortuitous for Tesla's PR that no onboard data will have survived the inferno, so the mealy-mouthed excuses or shameful silence can probably never be proven against them, short of an FBI raid on the premises.
If, at it appears to me most likely, this was in fact another AP incident, that would mean 4 fatalities Musk has chalked up thus far, further damping his already untrustworthy statistics.
In short, it leaves a distinct taste of salt in the mouth!
