content: I don't really see that interpretation. Like the article mentions, in the official report (archived here) they observed that autopilot has already resulted in a very sharp decline in accidents. Prior to autopilot, Teslas were involved in 1.3 crashes per million miles driven. After autopilot was installed, that rate dropped to 0.8! And the vehicles have now driven billions of miles (some 2-3 hundreds of millions of miles in autopilot mode) so that's a very healthy sample. Since there is extremely good evidence that the autopilot features are already improving safety the question then becomes much easier to approach. Is any particular feature of the autopilot that would have been involved in the fatal accident behaving in a way that would expose a driver to greater than normal levels of danger? And they decided the answer to that was no. The point is ultimately that these systems are already likely safer than humans. For now the goal is to get them to be even more safe while ensuring no issues go overlooked.