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).”
“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.
Yup. Some models don’t even have manual releases on the rear doors. If the battery ignites and you don’t have power to open the doors, you’re fucked. You only have about 15 seconds to get clear before you’re cooked by the lithium flames, and that’s not enough time to climb out of the back seat and exit via the front doors. Especially when you wasted the first 15 seconds fiddling with the door handle, because you expected it to actually open the door like it would on any other car.
Even the manual releases are difficult to use. The rear release (if it’s available at all) is hidden under two covers.
Saying “they’re designed with safety in mind” is, at best, misleading. Passing safety tests is the bare minimum. It would be like a contractor proudly boasting that they build all of their homes to code. Congrats, you built them to the bare minimum to be legally considered habitable? Building to code is the minimum to pass pre-sale inspection, not the goal.
Oh give me a break. Morons buying the cars is not Teslas fault. If you can’t read you got no business driving at all, and that counts double for Instagram Barbie getting “stuck” during car updates. There are some bad accidents, and some of them are even Tesla’s fault, but by the numbers the fires, autopilot errors, and getting stuck in the car are extreme edge cases compared to units sold. Of course there’s no need for extra risk and these issues should be fixed, but Tesla is no more responsible for people to don’t read directions than BMW is for people who don’t know their cars have turn signals.
Tesla isnt “struggling” with these issues, it’s just cool to shit on Tesla on the Internet.
When they’re lying to the public I think they do deserve some of the blame. “Full self-driving” is a fucking scam and Musk is a con artist.
Musk IS a con artist. It also says full self driving is supervised only. If you can’t read, well, life is gonna be hard for you.
Admitting you’re lying in the fine print doesn’t absolve you from lying in more obvious marketing materials. You don’t have to like it but very few people read the fine print.
It’s not fine print yo. When you go to use it, the “(supervised)” bit is always on the same line and there are gratuitous warnings. The only people who don’t know it has limitations are people reading about accidents in the news. People have been trying to circumvent the rules since plain old autopilot was out with water bottles taped to steering wheels, and when you break the rules you’re not entitled to sympathy.
Anyone saying accidents are because Tesla is making false statements has never owned one and are talking out of their ass. You have to navigate at least 3 menus to just ENABLE these features and all of them say “you gotta pay attention”.
When it comes to buying one? Sure, let’s say false advertising. When it comes to accidents, that is willfully not acknowledging warnings.
Except that we know their products have massive failings that other car companies don’t deal with. Like bro the doors can’t even fucking open properly in emergencies and people have died in them.
Tesla produces bad products, fucking deal with it.
Seeing some of our staff screech out of the carpark doing about 50 in them tells me at least part of the reason:
They’re bought by cunts.
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.
Considering that many of these “surveys” report statistics per model or even make, and some companies and models stretch years, if not decades (Corolla, Civic, F-150, etc.), and others are around for only a few years (Volt, Clarity, Ioniq), the results are almost always going to be out of whack.
Also, they probably don’t consider: which country/state the vehicle is available in (can’t buy Prius Prime and some EVs in the US midwest), the average accident rate for that country/state, demographics, place of use (city/country) etc.
A while ago, I saw that Chevy Volt was one of the most accident-prone cars or something like that. It has been out of production for a few years, and oldest cars were 10+ years old. Probably many resales, hand-me-downs, etc, all resulting in an emergent property of higher accident rate.
the results are almost always going to be out of whack.
True, but Tesla cars are relatively new compared to the average, and new cars should be safer. Right?
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.
My ford with adaptive cruise control will do this on a curve or under an overpass it dings the collision warning and hits the brakes, I just throttle up and ignore the lights, I would be terrified to hand over all control to a Tesla computer
it dings the collision warning and hits the brakes, I just throttle up and ignore the lights
I think that’s standard practice for using FSD Supervised as well.
Standard advised practice maybe, how many Tesla drivers have ‘accidentally’ hit something by now? Autopilot is great but your hand can never be far from the throttle
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
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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. 🤢🤦🏽♂️
It’s bad to have names for frequently observed issues in new software? It would seem weirder not to talk about it.
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It’s the fact it’s so common that it has a name. And then there’s the fact it’s a name that doesn’t really convey the seriousness. “Phantom Braking” is so dry and unemotive. It’s sounds as if it’s etherial and you’re unsure if it’s happening.
“No-cause emergency braking” is accurate and doesn’t soften the impact of the issue. As consumers we should label safety issues with terms that no company would ever want associated with their product.
Jargon is the term for articulate, specialized language. Normalizing the consumer experience of “phantom braking*” is fucking irresponsible of us as a global culture.
Sure it is. And we survive because we don’t rely on it and we read and understand that it’s not fully capable. If you get in, turn it on, and get in the back seat… well… The gene pool got a little deeper without you in it.
The author is very quick to write this off as “it’s people burning people off the line”, but that hardly 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.
Absolutely, the narrative seems wrong. Yes Tesla cars are fast, but many people driving them are environmentalists and grown ups. Not generally people out to burn rubber in my experience.
I think maybe people are surprised by the speed, because you don’t really notice exactly how fast you are driving and accelerating in a Tesla.
There may even be problems with some of the safety features, making people rely to much on them, so they think it’s alright to not pay full attention to their driving, expecting to get notices or even to be helped by safety features. Obviously FSD/autopilot is a driving hazard if you rely on that.I will argue that the controls of the car being on a screen instead of physical buttons is a problem too. That should simply not be allowed for functions that are needed for driving IMO.
People don’t become inherently better or worse drivers on average based on the car they buy, so such a significantly bad statistic, twice as bad as average, more likely shows there are actual inherent safety problems with the car IMO.
People don’t become inherently better or worse drivers on average based on the car they buy
Have you driven one? The instant torque and acceleration is really fun, to the point where I can honestly say I was a worse (or at least more irresponsible) driver for about the first 6 months that I owned my model 3.
How many of these fatal accidents were in the first few days or months of owning an EV?
I’m too lazy to find it but there was a similar statistic around motorcycle deaths. If you survived the first 6 months the rate went way down.
I mean, what do you expect when you are sitting on more lithium ion batteries than structural material?
Yeah when I was buying an electric car one of the vehicles I considered was the Mustang Mach E. It was nice. My partner at the time drove it first and liked it. I enjoyed the ride in the passenger seat.
Then I sat in the driver’s seat.
That was all I needed to say no. The whole feel of being in the driver’s seat made me feel like I wanted to go fast and drive aggressively.
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.
Maybe the Tesla is not so strong on actual safety features, and it’s more convenience features, that make people lazy so they don’t pay attention when they drive.
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.
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.
This is an actual demand by Musk. Cut everything that isn’t necessary. This is the reason turn signals are on the steering wheel, which actually makes it illegal to take drivers lessons in a Tesla in Norway.
It has also been demonstrated how this is very impractical in for instance roundabouts and impractical basic functions equals potential hazards.What are you even trying to say?
Do you know how to read? If you don’t, this isn’t going to be a very productive exchange.
