Tesla CEO Elon Musk said when Autopilot is activated, the odds of a Tesla owner getting in an accident drop significantly.
In fact, early tests show that the semi-autonomous system reduces the chance of an accident by as much as 50%, Musk said during an event in Oslo, Norway last week.
“The probability of having an accident is 50% lower if you have Autopilot on. Even with our first version," Musk said while speaking to Ketil Solvik-Olsen, Norway’s minister of Transport and Communications.
"So we can see, basically, what’s the average number of kilometers to an accident, accident defined by airbag deployment. Even with this early version, it’s almost twice as good as a person,” Musk said.
Musk said that the percentage of autonomous cars on the road will be very low in the beginning, so it's crucial that these early self-driving cars are capable of operating around a large number of non-autonomous vehicles at a level that is safer than a human driver.
"I think its going to be important, in terms of satisfying regulators and the public, to show statistically with a large amount of data, with billions kilometers of driving, to say that the safety level is definitively better by a meaningful margin if it's autonomous versus non-autonomous. I think that's really the thing that will be convincing," Musk said.
Tesla first rolled out Autopilot last Fall, but the company continues to develop the technology with the ultimate goal of making its car fully autonomous.
In January, Musk said that Autopilot was already capable of driving on the highway better than most humans and that within the next two years it's very likely the cars would be able to drive cross country on its own.
However, he noted that the next version of Autopilot would require more hardware for this to be possible.
Watch Musk's full interview below. His comments about autonomous vehicles begin around 22:00.
