Elon Musk Says Autopilot Accidents Are Becoming More Rare, So Tesla Simulates Close Calls

Every quarter, Tesla Inc TSLA releases a vehicle safety report. It shares information about the amount of accidents Tesla vehicles are involved in, and is mainly used to show when Tesla's Autopilot driver-assist is in use, accidents are less common.

While this is great news for the company and its customers, it's leading to a lack of certain types of data for Tesla's Autopilot and Full Self Driving (FSD) training.

Tesla uses its fleet of vehicles to train its neural networks that run its FSD software. But when certain situations are not represented enough in real life, Tesla can simulate them.

So Musk has said Tesla is simulating close call situations in order to train their neural nets, since Autopilot is getting into fewer accidents. This is all despite Tesla dramatically increasing deliveries quarter over quarter.

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When we need strange training examples, eg half a car on highway, Tesla sim delivers.

Also, accidents on Autopilot are becoming rarer, so we need more close call examples.

For safety tests, Autopilot sees dummy far away. Emergency braking only needed for distracted drivers.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 2, 2021

Musk also agreed to a question asking for Tesla to share information about the simulations during Tesla's AI day, expected to take place later this year.

"Sure. We can show them live. Eerily realistic. Maybe we should make a game," Musk replied.

Photo: Tesla Supercharger courtesy of Tesla.