Comment by dangus
5 hours ago
To pile on to this pathetic excuse for a company: anyone considering buying a Tesla should know that they are the #1 brand for fatal accidents in the United States, with over twice the accident rate of a typical automaker: https://www.roadandtrack.com/news/a62919131/tesla-has-highes...
This terrible statistic can’t just be explained by aggressive driving owners or some other factor like that. Dodge has plenty of aggressive drivers buying their 700HP V8 rear wheel drive vehicles but they have better fatal accident rates than Tesla.
I’m convinced that Tesla makes unsafe cars and covers it up wherever they can.
The crash test safety awards their vehicles have won are clearly not representative of reality.
The self-driving system Tesla offers is only “ahead” of the competition because the competition is unwilling to sell an unsafe system.
Your link only suggests driver and road conditions to be blamed. Consider the amount of power coming from a base model, I would lean towards driver. What they do with FSD stats is terrible and it would be refreshing to have some unbiased looks at it. Your narrative though is too biased and the link makes no connection to Tesla being responsible for the fatalities.
> Tesla vehicles have a fatal crash rate of 5.6 per billion miles driven, according to the study; Kia is second with a rate of 5.5,
Basically the same as Kia. Why are Kias so bad?
2 reasons I can see.
Kia have way smaller and cheaper cars with less security features to market. Tesla had front page news at some point saying how they were the safest car ever produced.
Tesla is giving people driving their cars a false sense of security.
But the article doesn't say that at all - quite the opposite:
> The study's authors make clear that the results do not indicate Tesla vehicles are inherently unsafe or have design flaws. In fact, Tesla vehicles are loaded with safety technology; the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) named the 2024 Model Y as a Top Safety Pick+ award winner, for example. 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.
Until recently, Kias were sub-entry level shitboxes
This would affect both driver selection and performance during impact
Slap a ridiculously powerful drivetrain on it and a premium price tag and you have a Tesla
I am sure there is a component of safety systems in a Kia but I would bet the bigger weighting is on driver profile.
[flagged]
> You’re so close to understanding!
Sorry, I don't understand this. I'm just asking a question. Do you reply to every question with that?
You’re missing the obvious explanation here. Driver profile. You could have the safest car around but if it’s being driven by unsafe drivers it will lead to higher accidents and fatalities.
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that study was pretty thoroughly debunked. Also, I believe it was put out by a lobbying group representing auto dealerships who see the Tesla DTC model as a mortal threat. There is a lot of legitimate criticism to be directed towards Tesla but the ISeeCars study "aint it".
I've heard people saying the study is bad, but whenever I've asked about why the answers have been pretty bad. Do you have a good source for why we should disregard it?
Find a link that shows it’s debunked then? All they did was analyze federal crash data.
I don’t know what’s so hard to believe about the study. Tesla’s numbers are pretty similar to other low-performing brands.
https://www.snopes.com/news/2025/01/11/tesla-fatality-rates/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISeeCars.com#Partnerships
https://x.com/larsmoravy/status/1860100416819855492
Looking for more. tl;dr is that NHTSA publishes accident rates but not mileage. ISeeCars has access to legacy auto mileage from dealership data but guessed at mileage for Tesla's in the period in question. Their methodology was not released and was a fraction of the total mileage that Tesla recorded over that period.
I do agree that Tesla could do a much better job with data transparency. But the claims of the ISC report are pretty difficult to reconcile with the crash test ratings they've gotten from many regulators across the world.
For a while they were the safest car in crash tests, weren't they? Was there an inflection point where they were dropping like a rock? Or is this a case of measuring different things (crash tests vs fatal accident rates)?
I know you probably don't know off the top of your head, I'm hoping someone can chime in.
Dan Luu had some interesting analysis about car safety, comparing how different auto-makers fared on newly introduced crash tests: https://danluu.com/car-safety/
The main take-away for me from that page is that very few manufacturers seem to design for actual safety (only Volvo had good results), and Tesla was angry that a new test had been introduced which feels indicative of a bad safety culture.
I am admittedly not a fan, but I note that in my social circle I don't have anyone who considers one, one that has one wants to sell one, one vendor has one ( the truck one ), but it is clearly for marketing purposes so at least it makes sense.
How do we know it can't be explained by self-selecting driver population? That sounds like the most likely explanation, and it's the only explanation advanced by the article you provided.
I guess there's something to be said for "hey, if you're considering buying a Tesla, you may be the kind of person that's likely to kill themself in a car crash. Consider buying a safer car or taking the bus!"
Reminds me of the first episode of madman where the guy pitches appealing to everyone’s “inherent death wish” when selling cigarettes haha
“That’s it? If you’re gonna die, die with us?”
They don’t, these are the anti-Tesla folks. No level of reasoning is available for discussions like this.
I don’t like Elon but I also don’t think fiction and misleading stats serve anyone.
Who would have guessed that a vehicle with no turn signal stalk or physical control to shift gears is unsafe!
Tesla sells too many vehicles for it to be a “self selecting driver population” thing anymore. They sell almost as many Model Ys as Honda CRVs.
I have a hard time believing that driver profile has anything to do with it, and I especially dislike the temptation to explain away the data by making unsubstantiated excuses for the company.
Dodge has better statistics than Tesla and they almost exclusively sell muscle cars.
We're talking about a brand whose every car has at least 350HP, and most of them have more.
It's not an apples-to-oranges comparison.
So why is Dodge better on the list? Most Dodge models sold are rear wheel drive performance cars. They basically only sell the Challenger/Charger and the Hornet SUV that nobody’s buying.
The lengths people will go to defend Tesla continue to astound me. Can’t we just say that they suck without making excuses for them?
Because the word "data" doesn't have magical properties? And the fact that you have some "data" that seems to contradict both the personal experience of many other people and data points is actually curious?
Like this: https://www.euroncap.com/assessments/tesla/model%2B3/1110/
Something has to be flawed or there has to be some bias.
> I’m convinced that Tesla makes unsafe cars and covers it up wherever they can.
Tesla makes unsubstantiated, exaggerated claims about capabilities of their system and directly encourages unsafe behavior. How many other manufacturers encourage test subjects to drive full speed ahead into a concrete divider "to see what happens"?