If we're really pushing this analogy however, then you would expect the teacher to have a much higher accident rate than the average driver because you're claiming the teacher only does the hard stuff, or, in the very least, misses out on the majority of the easy stuff (assuming, for comparability, that the teacher is an average competence driver).

Specifically, if you're claiming only 99/100 miles are easy and have no chance of crashes, then if a human only drives for the 1/100 miles that are hard, they should have a 100x higher crash rate than the human that drives all 100. They should probably have an even worse crash rate because of the switching cost of suddenly taking control, unless you want to make the weird argument that suddenly taking control of an autopilot car is safer.

The tesla report says autopilot experiences a crash every 4 million miles. With autopilot disengaged, it's every 2 million miles. The baseline national average is every 0.5 million miles.

I can't find the perfect statistics, but one study suggest uneducated people are 4x more likely to die in a car crash, so let's give some generous rounding and say, normalized to wealth, tesla drivers not actively using autopilot are at comparable levels to the average driver (1 per 2 million miles).

Unless telsa drivers are phenomenal emergency handlers, its difficult to explain how the non-autopilot crash rate could be so low, while also claiming tesla is hiding the true crash rate of its autopilot features by pushing difficult miles to human drivers, because the human drivers are receiving normal crash rates on what you claim is a much more difficult set of miles.

Its possible (probable) that the autopilot would experience a higher crash rate if it were not allowed to call in a human. But to ask generally if autopilot is reducing the total number of accidents that the drivers would experience otherwise, I'd say 'probably'.