Good question Nic Werner! I just wrote about this in my column for Online Spin. Here’s the relevant bit:

“My condolences go out to the family and loved ones of Joshua Brown. In no way do I want to diminish their loss.

Joshua’s death was the first fatality for a self-driving car. It happened after more than 130 million miles had been logged in Autopilot mode — a significantly better record than human drivers in America (who average a fatality every 94 million miles) or worldwide (60 million miles).”

There’s more to it than that, though. When is the last time someone died in a human-driven car accident and every other driver on the road became better as a result? It doesn’t happen. But that’s what happens with self-driving cars: there’s an accident, and huge teams from both within and without Tesla investigate, and everything they learn goes into making the system better and safer, and all of those upgrades get disseminated to all the cars with Autopilot.