I generally agree with you. It should, however, be noted that you'll need to compare fatality rates caused by human drivers and fatality rates caused by Teslas autopilot under the same driving conditions. I am pretty sure that there is a vast amount of driving conditions under which the autopilot cannot be engaged safely (and will not get engaged). It's one thing driving on a highway and another thing driving in a crowded city. Here in Germany we have comparably little fatalities on highways. Most occur on rural roads and cities.
You have to distinguish between fatal crashes and all crashes. Here [1] are the data for the US if you can tolerate that site. What is the typical condition for a fatal crash? It's extremely counter intuitive. It is driving straight, on a major roadway, in good weather, during the day time, while sober, in a 4 door hardtop sedan. Seriously.
I'm reluctant to go social science and start handwaving too much causality there, but on the other hand I don't think it's entirely unreasonable to observe that those 'easy' driving conditions also tend to be some of the highest speed driving conditions. Creates a nasty combination of of a situation where we might be more subject to lapses of attention, due to comfort, and exponentially increased consequences when that lapse results in a crash.
But the really cool thing here is that these are also the conditions that right now the self driving systems are rocking. In other words there's actually a chance you're right that we're not comparing apples to apples, but instead are actually oversampling conditions where fatal accidents are more likely to happen!
