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zombocomvibes • last Friday at 7:59 PM • 6 replies • view on HN

They have the highest rate of fatal accidents across all car brands, more than double the average.

https://www.roadandtrack.com/news/a62919131/tesla-has-highes...


Replies

ggreer • last Friday at 11:09 PM

Your link is to an article that references an iSeeCars study from two years ago. They got their crash data from NHTSA FARS, but got their mileage data from sales of used cars on their platform. At the time I noticed some issues with their mileage data.[1] It's very likely that Teslas sold on their platform have very low mileage compared to average, because people either sell a car quickly after buying it, or they hang on to it for years. This also lines up with the fact that the other cars in their unsafe list were all released recently.

Working backwards from their stats & FARS data, I calculated that for their claims to be true, each Model Y would need to accumulate only 4,300 miles per year. This is far below Tesla's reports of 13,000-14,000 miles per year. Also iSeeCars claimed that an average of 2.8 vehicles were involved in fatal accidents for every billion miles traveled. But at the time the US had 13.3 deaths per billion miles traveled. So for their data to be correct, the average fatal accident would need to have five fatalities.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42209142

BalinKing • last Friday at 9:14 PM

Your comment is—at best—misleading. See the last two paragraphs of the article:

> The study's authors make clear that the results do not indicate Tesla vehicles are inherently unsafe or have design flaws.... Many of the other cars that ranked highly on the list have also been given high ratings for safety by the likes of IIHS and the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration, as well....

> “The models on this list likely reflect a combination of driver behavior and driving conditions, leading to increased crashes and fatalities”....

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nomel • last Friday at 8:33 PM

Safety of a car is a different axis than safety of the driver. That combines them. Related, it's why performance cars have higher insurance rates: people who buy fast cars go fast.

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roncesvalles • yesterday at 12:17 PM

The fatality rate of an accident includes all parties involved. Most often when a Tesla hits someone, it kills the other guy, since it's basically an ultra-dense block of mass that can do 0 to 60 in 3.5 seconds, very quietly and without launch control[1]. Teslas are incredibly safe for the people inside the Tesla.

[1]Lots of other cars have technically faster times than Teslas, but most of them require launch control, good tires, and sound like the engine's about to explode. You can floor the Tesla at any time and the software will deliver however much power it can without slipping.

m463 • last Friday at 10:56 PM

i think some self selecting populations are skewed.

i remember reading about the first cobra in the 60's, where a huge percentage of the owners didn't live to make the second payment.

762236 • last Friday at 10:35 PM

This is silly. I bought my Model Y specifically because its safety is so high. You can see it in (1) the crash rate numbers when using FSD, (2) the crash-test ratings are fantastic, and (3) impossible situations where people survived such as plummeting off a cliff on route 1.