Tesla chief executive Elon Musk has said that half of all the people who died in car accidents last year could have been saved if they had a car with Tesla’s Autopilot feature.

Musk made the claim in an email to financial journalist Carol J. Loomis, who had published an article in Fortune Magazine which insinuated that Tesla had glossed over issues regarding Autopilot’s safety.

Autopilot, which is available on the Tesla Model S and Model X, as well as the upcoming Model 3, allows the cars to drive themselves on certain stretches of motorway in the US with no driver input.

'Half a million people could be saved'

The South African-born tech mogul publicly denounced the article on Twitter and sent an email to Loomis, which stated: “Please, take 5 mins and do the bloody math before you write an article that misleads the public.”

He continued: “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.”

Fortune’s article came in the wake of what’s believed to be the first fatality caused by autonomous driving technology, when a Tesla Model S driver was killed in a collision while using Autopilot.

@alansmurray If you care about auto deaths as material to stock prices, why no articles about 1M+/year deaths from other auto companies? — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 5, 2016

Joshua Brown collided with the back of a lorry trailer earlier this year, reportedly while using the Autopilot function, though investigations to determine the exact cause of the crash are still ongoing.

Musk referred to the fact that Brown’s accident is the first known fatality that’s occurred, despite the fact that Tesla drivers have covered a cumulative 130 million miles while using Autopilot.

Statistics show that in the US one road fatality occurs every 94 million miles, while globally one person will die for every 60 million miles that motorists collectively travel.

Potential to cut road fatalities in half

Although the sample size isn’t perfect, it roughly indicates that using Autopilot is statistically at least 50 per cent safer than not using it, meaning it could potentially cut global road deaths in half.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) in the US has officially launched a probe into the performance of the Autopilot system at the time of Brown’s incident, and any other factors.

However, it stressed that so far authorities have found no reason to believe that there was any defect in the system or that Autopilot is otherwise unsafe to use.

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