Issue 23  July 5th 2016

Fortune Magazine published a weird article today trying to tie Tesla’s $2.3 billion secondary offering announced on May 18 with the recent fatal accident in a Model S on Autopilot. The author, Carol J. Loomis, highlights that Tesla didn’t publicly disclose the news of the crash, which occurred on May 7, until June 30 when NHTSA announced that it will be investigating the accident.

Fortune reached out to Tesla for a comment on the assertion that the crash should have been considered material during the stock offering. Loomis somehow didn’t disclose her side of the conversation but published an excerpt of Musk’s response after he said that the event “is not material to the value of Tesla”:

“Indeed, if anyone bothered to do the math (obviously, you did not) they would realize that of the over 1M auto deaths per year worldwide, approximately half a million people would have been saved if the Tesla autopilot was universally available. Please, take 5 mins and do the bloody math before you write an article that misleads the public.”

Musk is referring to the fact that the accident is the first known fatality in just over 130 million miles where Autopilot was activated compared to about a fatality for approximately every 60 million miles globally. It’s not a perfect sample size, but it roughly indicates that driving with Tesla’s Autopilot is at the very least 50% safer than without.

It’s the first time ever that Tesla has its total quarterly deliveries go down two quarters in a row and the Model S deliveries are at their lowest point since Q3 2014. The good news is that the company appears to have kept some cards in its sleeve to generate more demand for the sedan. Upcoming expansions to other markets, like Mexico, South Korea, Eastern Europe and the Middle East, should help generate more demand for the vehicle.

Releasing a new higher-end version of its sedan has always helped the automaker generate more demand for the Model S, like it did with the P85D and then the P90D versions, and now soon the P100D should help Tesla capitalize on its existing customer base. The introduction of Autopilot 2.0 hardware could also help generate demand as more potential buyers will feel that the vehicle will now be “future proof”, which should facilitate pulling the trigger.

While the second quarter delivery results are disappointing and it should reflect poorly on the company’s earnings set for release next month, it’s not all doom and gloom for Tesla, The company appears to be setting things up for an interesting second half of 2016 – both for production, as the company aims to produce 50,000 in the next 6 months, and on base on a product standpoint.

The new 8.0 update, which is currently being tested with a select few Tesla owners and should be pushed to the fleet in the next few weeks, will allow for improvements in the general Autopilot experience in traffic, but more significantly, it will introduce automatic off-ramp in exits on the highway.

When Elon Musk first introduced the Autopilot, he made it clear that hardware limitations will not allow for a fully self-driving system, it will have to wait for the Autopilot 2.0, but he said that the system will enable self-steering on highways and self-driving at low-speed in parking situations, like with the Summon feature.

The v8.0 update will truly enable this vision by allowing off-ramp exit through activating the turn signal – much like the automatic lane change under the current version of Autosteer. A common problem with the early version of the Autopilot was that it had a tendency to try to take exits on the highway when it wasn’t supposed to. After just a few weeks, Model S owners fed the Autopilot’s collective network intelligence with enough information that it was able to largely eliminate the issue.