What does worse mean? Tesla's AI drives worse than an 80 year old with cataracts, but on the other hand it can react faster to obstacles than the fastest race-car drivers.
I don't own a Tesla so have no direct experience, but my guess would be that it might crash less than a human, but has far more near-misses.
Worse probably means something like "accidents per mile".
Edit: was curious, so I did the math. The standard unit seems to be 'crashes per 100 million miles' so according to the Tesla safety report (only source on Autopilot safety I could find easily) that works out to [0]: one accident for every 4.41 million miles driven = 22.7 accidents per 100 million miles.
Without autopilot, the AAA foundation (again, easily available source, feel free to find a better one, this is from 2014) [1] says that our best drivers are in the 60-69 age range, and have 241 accidents per 100 million miles. Our worst drivers are our younger teens (duh) with 1432 crashes per 100 million miles.
So unless you can find better data that contradicts this, Autopilot seems like a net benefit.
Autopilot only works on highways and decent weather and visibility — i.e. the least accident-prone scenarios possible. AFAIK, AAA’s stats count accidents in all situations
I think your analysis is a good one given the data we have, and can be used to draw some conclusions or guide general discussion. However the analysis is indeed limited by the data available. The AAA data does not consider variability by gender, race, socioeconomics, location, etc. Further it does not normalize variability in the types of driving being done (teslas have limited range, are not towing trailers, etc), nor other technological advances (modern vs older vehicles).
In fact, almost all new cars, Teslas included, since 2022, have an Automatic Emergency Breaking system (AEB), which will hit the breaks if you're about to hit something. If I were walking in a parking lot and had to step in front of an older SUV or a Tesla, I'd step in front of the Telsa.
I don't own a Tesla so have no direct experience, but my guess would be that it might crash less than a human, but has far more near-misses.