Self-driving cars crash, too, but figuring out what it means requires much better data

This week, for the first time ever, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration released data on crashes involving cars equipped with advanced driver-assist systems and automated driving technology. A lot of headlines — including The Verge’s — focused on the number of Tesla vehicles that crashed, which is understandable because Tesla had a lot of crashes.

But the numbers themselves don’t tell us the whole story. In fact, they don’t really tell us much of …

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