I just saw the headline on Google News: “Tesla Has the Highest Fatal Accident Rate of All Auto Brands, Study Finds.” Yikes. I’ve covered how safe Tesla vehicles are for many years. In fact, it was the #1 reason why I bought a Tesla Model 3 in 2019. So, on the one hand, it was surprising to see that headline. But not really.
We already saw last year that one of the reasons Hertz was selling off its Tesla vehicles and not buying more was because they were more likely to get into accidents, and then waiting for repairs/service/parts took longer than average as well. Those kinds of things add up a great deal when you’re managing a big fleet of vehicles.
Are Tesla vehicles actually designed to be unsafe? No, that’s not the issue. The issue is that while Tesla was designing its cars to be extra safe, it was also constantly focusing on making the cars super quick (insanely quick, ludicrously quick, plaid quick) and regularly hyping up how quick its cars were in order to stimulate consumer demand.
Believe it or not, when you’ve consumed all that hype around how quick a Tesla is, it’s easy to be influenced and want to smoke cars off the line at a red light, or just drive like a bat out of hell. The problem is: that leads to accidents, and fast accidents lead to deaths. Let’s get to the shocking stats:
“Tesla’s vehicles have the highest fatal accident rate among all car brands in America, according to a recent iSeeCars study that analyzed data from the U.S. Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS).”
The author is very quick to write this off as “it’s people burning people off the line”, but that hardley a trait shared with Kia’s in the number two spot.
It’s still very possible it could be something to do with the design of the car.
“They are designed with safety in mind” yea! That’s the fuckin’ bar, it’s not special!
They can get good crash ratings all day but they keep struggling with people getting stuck in the cars, fires were an issue at least for a bit, and their marketting is willfully lying about the vehicles abilities so the average person thinks the car can do shit that it really can’t.
Surviving the crash is only step one before being able to get out while shit’s on fire or underwater, and step zero is avoiding it which they also can’t manage very well.
The top five most dangerous cars are the Hyundai Venue, Chevrolet Corvette, Mitsubishi Mirage, Porsche 911, and Honda CR-V Hybrid, with fatal accident rates nearly five times higher than the average vehicle
Seeing this makes me think there’s something funky with the methodology as these are all low production number vehicles. What’s likely happening is that 2 or 3 people dying in a crash in a vehicle that only sold, for example, 1000 units looks a lot worse than 100 people dying in a car that sold 2 million units.
This is just like that other nearly identical study from a year or two ago that found that Pontiac drivers were the “safest drivers on the road” based off nothing more than examining insurance policy applications, determining who had an accident on their record, and assigning that “accident” to whatever vehicle the person was trying to insure. Pontiac shut down around 2009 so of course you wouldn’t see many people trying to insure one in the 2020s which completely skews the results.
As a Tesla owner, Autopilot is sketchy AF sometimes
When I owned mine, more than once it slammed the brakes on for no reason on the highway. Not quite locking up, but definitely going from 75 to 50 in a couple seconds. For no fucking reason.
That’s not necessarily even a Tesla thing though. When I got my Subaru back when collision avoidance was new, someone tried to talk me out of it for this exact reason. They believed it was prone to phantom braking
Yeah, phantom breaking was a big issue back then. It’s improved, but still not perfect.
phantom breaking [sic]
That’s not something that should have a normalizing term, FFS. 🤢🤦🏽♂️
The point is that if you design things quickly then you’re intentionally sacrificing today. It is a conscious choice. It was made by management many times. The second point is in the cars that they sell are expensive if they can save money by cutting on safety testing or safety features, and they think they can get away with it, of course they’re going to. That’s capitalism. Pieces of s*** make pieces of s*** and sell them to you.
when you’ve consumed all that hype around how quick a Tesla is, it’s easy to be influenced and want to smoke cars off the line at a red light, or just drive like a bat out of hell.
owners just need to chillax a bit more. And Tesla vehicles are great for relaxing and driving calmly and smoothly — that’s how I normally drive these days
It seems the article can be summarized in the two words, “skill issue”.
I’d prefer actual data though. It’s not like Tesla owners are all old Mustang owners. This is really opinion.
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is it really the acceleration going beyond people’s skills?
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is it distraction from the screen? It did take me a bit to learn it
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are they idiots who trust autopilot too much or even workaround the safeguards?
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Good engineering but irresponsible ownership? From a musk company? Who would have thought.
Sad to see the extra safety was not enough to make up for the high performance.
