How Tesla’s Autopilot Could Save 1 Million Lives and $3.2 Trillion Every Year
In order to make conservation more appealing, economists have taken to calculating the economic value of natural ecosystems. Whether a pond, mangrove forest, or prairie — ecosystems have an inherent value, from tourism, to scenery, to carbon capture.
For example, Norway is paying Indonesia $1 billion to preserve rainforest for carbon storage and sequestration that will mitigate effects of climate change. In Vietnam, mangrove forests protect coastal regions from flooding, and an investment of $1.1 million in their conservation saved $7.3 million annually that would have been spent maintaining dikes instead.
So, why can’t we do the same for automation, which also has a clear economic value associated with increased safety? In other words, can we estimate the value of investments in vehicle automation, in both human and economic terms?
The Autopilot safety multiplier
According to Tesla, there is approximately one fatality per 60 million miles driven worldwide. Tesla’s Autopilot, which has logged more than any other production car thus far, has recorded only a single fatality (and zero recorded injuries) in ~240 million miles driven across a diverse array of countries and conditions (240M is a conservative extrapolation from the reported 222M miles in October 2016).
So, we can easily deduce that Tesla’s Autopilot is already roughly 4X safer, statistically, than manual driving, with .24 the rate of fatal accidents.
And it’s important to mention that these miles have been driven by Autopilot 1.0 at Level 2 autonomy, where the driver is actively engaged in monitoring the car. It is reasonable to assume that safety will only improve as Tesla and other manufacturers reach Level 3 autonomy this year, and Level 5 by 2018.
Calculating saved lives
According to the World Health Organization, there are 1.25 million fatalities per year due to car crashes. So the easy back-of-the-napkin math shows that automation at least as safe as Autopilot would save 950,000 lives globally.
That’s nearly one million lives every year, based on extremely conservative estimates.
The economic value of saving lives
Again, according to the WHO, “research carried out in 2010 suggests that road traffic crashes cost countries approximately 3% of their gross national product. This figure rises to 5% in some low- and middle-income countries.”
If we average the cost to 4% of GNP globally while maintaining the same safety multiplier (.24), we find that automation could save 3% of lost GNP.
In 2015, Gross World Product totaled about $107 trillion. Again, some quick math shows that automation at the current level of Tesla’s Autopilot 1.0, has the potential to save $3.2 trillion in otherwise-lost economic activity every year.
How’s that for a good investment?
