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Tesla Drivers Have the Highest Crash Rate of Any Brand: Study

65 points by mikece 3y ago

atticora 3y ago
> Tesla's Autopilot and its Autosteer feature could be why Tesla is so crash-prone. It isn't obvious that the mortality rate in a crash involving an autopilot is similar to that without one. It could be considerably higher or lower, something you need to know to make good policy or a smart purchase. If there's enough data for a mortality per crash comparison it didn't make it into the article.
stephenitis 3y ago
They count pure # of accidents and not accidents per miles driven from what I heard. misleading
- ejstronge 3y ago
  > They count pure # of accidents and not accidents per miles driven from what I heard. > misleading I will agree that the data presented could be much better than they currently are. To call this misleading, however, wouldn't you have to have a reasonable prior that the miles driven for Teslas are so much higher than the other brands that the trend we see doesn't make sense? I would be more persuaded if you said that Teslas are more likely to drive in urban environments where crash risks are higher - it is hard to imagine that two popular brands with ICEs, Ram and Subaru, would have fewer miles driven than Teslas
  - h0l0cube 3y ago
    > I would be more persuaded if you said that Teslas are more likely to drive in urban environments where crash risks are higher Even then, a cursory Google leads to this: > In 2021, the rate of crash deaths per 100 million miles traveled was much higher in rural areas than in urban areas (1.72 in rural areas compared with 1.19 in urban areas). https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/urban-rural-comparison https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/urban...
    - ahahahahah 3y ago
      > In 2021, the rate of crash deaths per ... That would be relevant if we were talking about crash deaths.
      - h0l0cube 3y ago
        It seems disingenuous to dismiss this offhand as a reasonable proxy for incidents. It would be strange for there to be no correlation between fatal risk of injury, and chance of any injury, or 'incidents'.
        ejstronge 3y ago
        It is not disingenuous - it is quite clear that the kind of driving that happens in rural settings (fast, two-lane roads, no lights) is different from the kind of driving that happens in cities (slower, larger roads, street lights, stop lights) https://www.mvmlaw.com/blog/do-car-accidents-happen-more-in-rural-or-urban-areas/ https://www.mvmlaw.com/blog/do-car-accidents-happen-more-in-... has multiple links supporting this
        h0l0cube 3y ago
        Absolutely not contesting that 'driving is different', but GP was suggesting that crash deaths doesn't correlate with crashes fatal or otherwise, or at least correlates differently enough between rural and urban. Nothing in that link supports that claim. Intuitively one might say that high velocity crashes could involve more fatalities, but an easy counter to that is that pedestrian deaths would represent more in urban areas.
- yumraj 3y ago
  Just grabbing at the straws now are we? (To clarify, referring to the comment above, not the study)
- spamizbad 3y ago
  I'd be skeptical that Tesla vehicles, which are popular in urban areas, would have more miles driven on average than pickup trucks which are more popular (but certainly also present elsewhere) in more rural / exurban areas where travel distances to work and shopping are longer.
  - gonzo41 3y ago
    In rural areas you see less traffic. Though tesla's ship with power modes that far exceed the traffic limits in most places so speed may be a contributing factor. Especially in the urban setting. I'm also wondering when the regulation to limit tops speeds in electric cars will occur. It seems inevitable that with the computers onboard the ability to limit speeds based on location data, ie what road you're on, will be here sooner rather than later.
sxp 3y ago
When the opening line is "Just days after Tesla was forced to recall nearly every car it ever made over safety issues involving its Autopilot system..", it's hard to take the rest of the article seriously. The "recall" is actually the NHTSA pushing Tesla to change how they monitor drivers. "The fix will be deployed to roughly two million cars via an over-the-air update that should prevent owners from tricking the system." from TFA's link. The linked LendingTree article actually says "Across 30 car brands analyzed, Ram has the worst drivers. Nationally, Ram drivers had 32.90 driving incidents (accidents, DUIs, speeding and citations) per 1,000 drivers from Nov. 14, 2022, through Nov. 14, 2023. Tesla (31.13) and Subaru (30.09) were the only other brands whose drivers had incident rates above 30.00.". Without further breakdown of accident/incident types and segmentation by gender & age, TheDrive's article is just wild speculation.
- h0l0cube 3y ago
  The article quotes both ‘accident’ and ‘incident’ rates and explains the distinction: > According to LendingTree, between Nov. 14, 2022, and Nov. 14, 2023, there were 23.54 Tesla accidents per 1,000 drivers. Only two other brands had more than 20 accidents per 1,000 drivers, Ram (22.76) and Subaru (20.90). That accident rate also helped it earn the second-highest incident rate, 31.13, behind only Ram (32.90). The difference between accident rate and incident rate is that the latter also factors DUIs, speeding, and any other citations.
- stonogo 3y ago
  It's a little weird to discount an article because it accurately reports a fact, using well-defined terms. It's getting exhausting listening to Tesla fans re-prosecute the definition of 'recall' any time someone uses the term correctly.
  - pbhjpbhj 3y ago
    I see both sides, a recall is usually a very expensive process of each car returning to a particular car service business and having manual actions performed on it by a mechanic. That might include software updates, plugging in a tool to push an update; but by direct local connection. OTA updates feel different, particularly when the vehicle isn't physically _recalled_ to a manufacturer controlled service space. I'm not that familiar with the recall, would NHTSA have demanded it if it were all Tesla cars being physically recalled? (potentially resulting in the end of Tesla?)
_ea1k 3y ago
It'd be interesting to see more data from this. Were the accidents tied to the specific vehicle? Or to all the vehicles requesting the quote? Also, age and other demographic breakdowns would likely be telling. Seeing RAM at the top gives some clues where that might lead.
- acdha 3y ago
  That was my first thought, too: I’d love to see it broken down by models - Tesla’s marketing has been about sports car performance so I’d bet that if you broke most of these down more you’d see it’s not the brand but certain buyers. I doubt Subaru Forrester drivers are pushing those numbers up, either.
  - pbhjpbhj 3y ago
    Wouldn't you expect supercar brands Ferrari, Zonder (sp?), Lamborghini, etc., to have terrible crash rates? Especially given the small numbers that most be sold. Are they all excluded from the figures?
    - acdha 3y ago
      It’s an interesting question. I’d think that they’d do better because you have to be a serious car nut to want one even if you’re rich whereas it’s not that hard for an irresponsible teenager to get a more normal car. I’d love to test that guess against hard data, however.
    - _ea1k 3y ago
      I'd guess that most of those are owned by older drivers and not driven nearly as much. Most don't rack up tons of miles. Probably accidents per mile would be high, but I doubt accidents per vehicle would be notable.
- pbhjpbhj 3y ago
  Not being familiar with the USA car market demographics could you suggest how RAM gives clues that we're looking at confounding factors?
psunavy03 3y ago
> Last year, the Department of Justice launched an investigation into Tesla and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) found that 322 frontal and other collisions resulted from Autopilot disengaging. As the recall mentioned above highlights, it was too easy for drivers to leave Tesla's Autopilot on its own and completely relinquish control. We need less technical fixes for things like this and more legal consequences for drivers who are found to have used the system negligently. Want to act like a clown in your self-driving Tesla? Great, you're still responsible for what it does and now you can deal with a criminal conviction, same as someone driving drunk.
- ceejayoz 3y ago
  We threaten people with death or life in prison and they still do things. I'm skeptical of the ability to prevent bad behavior in this fashion - especially when it's a much greyer area of culpability.
- onetimeuse92304 3y ago
  Who'd have guessed it is hard to safely transition from not driving/inattentive to driving in an instant while in traffic.
- hypeatei 3y ago
  This is a general problem in the US because we're so dependent on cars. We're very lax on car deaths / injuries caused by negligence. I think the saying goes "If you're going to kill someone, do it in a car"
- Xylakant 3y ago
  This will not help. Humans are fundamentally incapable of babysitting repeptitive boring tasks that require interaction only in failure cases. Expecting humans to do so is expecting superhuman capabilities and no amount of threatening the drivers with legal consequencces will change the outcome. All you'll achieve is punishing the poor sobs that trusted teslas marketing stunt. If you want this to change, make Tesla liable and they'll quickly fix this, one way or another.
tqi 3y ago
Great illustration of lying with statistics. This is objectively true, but the conclusions are murky at best. Urban vs highway miles, geographic distribution, driver demographics all almost certainly have more to do with this metric than the car itself.
ripper1138 3y ago
You guys are trying to discredit the statistics here, but anyone in the Bay Area knows this is true. I wish there were stats on “near accidents” because Tesla drivers would be leading that too.
- pests 3y ago
  My buddy hit a construction barrel the other day with his Tesla on FSD Beta. He never once took ownership and kept referring to his accident as "the car hit the barrel". It doesn't suprise me one bit people get into way more accidents while in a Tesla. I bet if you split further into Tesla's without any autopilot or FSD what so ever, the stat would return to normal. Or on rental Teslas, which are always speed locked to like 80mph / calm mode and no autopilot or FSD features (at least around me.)
- thechao 3y ago
  I don't have the self-driving feature in my Tesla; I have, however, developed a significant respect for the torque it delivers. It is, by a long margin, the quickest accelerating vehicle I have ever owned. The first three weeks I owned it, I think I nearly hit several cars: you press the accelerator and then you're there. I had to completely retrain myself to drive the car & carefully feather in acceleration.
  - hangonhn 3y ago
    I really think this is one of the keys here. People coming from ICE aren't used to that much torque and it comes at the beginning and not the middle of the curve. If the road is even a little wet, I can see how this could be an issue and catch people by surprise. I remember going from a naturally aspirated car to a turbocharged car and getting caught by surprised when it kicked in. I think the surprise for EV drivers might be even worse. Subtle changes like that take time to get used to. I wonder if the statistics can be broken down further into how long someone has driven an EV and see if a different pattern emerges.
  - vl 3y ago
    This is why my M3P is in the chill mode. Sport mode is too jumpy and uncomfortable to drive.
soliton4 3y ago
am i the only one who expected a review of device drivers provided by tesla?
JumpinJack_Cash 3y ago
[flagged]
- onethought 3y ago
  But they made an electric car. That did revolutionise the industry. There is a bunch of non-auto pilot innovations they’ve made as well.
  - JumpinJack_Cash 3y ago
    > > But they made an electric car. That did revolutionise the industry. That is what I meant by re-inventing the wheel for political purposes. The consumer doesn't care about the type of propellent the car uses, it was an imposition from the above which raised the price of cars and reduced their range and aestetics because of batteries design constraints. Tesla specifically also have very poor interior design and quality of materials.
    - _ea1k 3y ago
      I've never met a Tesla owner that bought because a politician told them to.
      - JumpinJack_Cash 3y ago
        No they buy because techno-utopian cult leader Elon Musk told them so, the political handouts just gave them an extra 8000$ reasons to make it palatable to the family budget to buy a go kart for rich people.
        _ea1k 3y ago
        Some of their best years in the US were years when the tax credit wasn't available. Interest rates were a lot lower back then, though, which makes a surprisingly big difference.
        onethought 3y ago
1-6 3y ago
> Tesla's Autopilot and its Autosteer feature could be why Tesla is so crash-prone. I disagree with this statement. I think the greater issue is that suddenly, you’ve you’ve given every Tesla owner a car that can accelerate to the equivalent of a base Porsche 911 or better. Most people (I include myself) will not responsibly handle this much power.
- kulahan 3y ago
  I think a lot about those videos where someone gets their first mustang and absolutely RIP out of the parking lot, only to total the car 50 yards down the road, and imagine if every toyota camry out there had that kind of power.
- h0l0cube 3y ago
  Then you could see this borne out in the data with other EV sthat feature a similar acceleration (and demographic) profile. But I think it’s both, but acceleration is harder to control with legislation.. maybe a limit in urban areas?
  - aziaziazi 3y ago
    Not sure if I infesterions your comment, but can’t we use torque here as an acceleration proxy ?
  - _ea1k 3y ago
    That's possible. This data doesn't break it down by model, but it might even be true. No other make would be as heavily influenced by it as Tesla. EVs are less than 10% of sales for most other makes, so the impact would be nearly negligible.
  - rolldat777 3y ago
    There is already legislation about acceleration, it falls under e.g. 'exhibition of speed' and everyone one of these modern EVs is able to violate it (and do regularly, afaict).
    - 3y ago
justrealist 3y ago
The average Tesla is very new and pretty expensive (incl to repair) so I'm kind of wondering whether Tesla owners are just more likely to report minor accidents they can get covered by insurance. When I drove an old Mazda I didn't bother reporting anything short of catastrophic damage (obv if I caused an accident for someone else I'd report)... I don't think that's true for someone driving a new Model Y.
kube-system 3y ago
Doing this by brand seems to skew the numbers towards brands with model lineups that attract certain types of buyers, and their inherent behaviors, rather than on the merits of the vehicle. For example, the bottom of the list is not filled with brands with a lot of safety features, it is filled with brands that predominantly don't (/didn't) target riskier groups of drivers. People who buy boring vehicles drive differently than people who buy powerful and exciting vehicles. There is self-selection at play here.
- cbsmith 3y ago
  Yes. The driver is invariably the most important variable.
015a 3y ago
This is confusing: Tesla publishes that Tesla's vehicles, both with and without autopilot, are the subject of substantially fewer accidents per million miles driven than the US average; last quarter, somewhere ~4.8M miles/accident on autopilot, ~1.5M miles/accident Tesla w/o autopilot, and ~0.5M miles/accident US average. Given I'd like to assume the best and conclude no one is lying here; obviously what they're measuring is slightly different, but it feels like they're similar enough that we shouldn't be getting entirely opposite outcomes. Do Tesla drivers drive substantially more? Are Tesla drivers just more likely to report crashes to their insurance/police (versus, Tesla's data is probably from automated internal observability)? If Tesla's data is based on internal observability, is that observability underreporting incidents to the mothership? [1] https://www.tesla.com/VehicleSafetyReport https://www.tesla.com/VehicleSafetyReport
- _ea1k 3y ago
  This is specifically among people who are shopping for insurance. There will naturally be biases in the data.
- clouddrover 3y ago
  > Given I'd like to assume the best and conclude no one is lying here That's a bad assumption. Tesla routinely lies about everything from full self-driving to price to quarter mile times. It's built into the company's DNA.
ChrisArchitect 3y ago
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38690496 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38690496

65 points by mikece 3y ago

> Tesla's Autopilot and its Autosteer feature could be why Tesla is so crash-prone. It isn't obvious that the mortality rate in a crash involving an autopilot is similar to that without one. It could be considerably higher or lower, something you need to know to make good policy or a smart purchase. If there's enough data for a mortality per crash comparison it didn't make it into the article.

stephenitis 3y ago

They count pure # of accidents and not accidents per miles driven from what I heard. misleading

ejstronge 3y ago
> They count pure # of accidents and not accidents per miles driven from what I heard. > misleading I will agree that the data presented could be much better than they currently are. To call this misleading, however, wouldn't you have to have a reasonable prior that the miles driven for Teslas are so much higher than the other brands that the trend we see doesn't make sense? I would be more persuaded if you said that Teslas are more likely to drive in urban environments where crash risks are higher - it is hard to imagine that two popular brands with ICEs, Ram and Subaru, would have fewer miles driven than Teslas
- h0l0cube 3y ago
  > I would be more persuaded if you said that Teslas are more likely to drive in urban environments where crash risks are higher Even then, a cursory Google leads to this: > In 2021, the rate of crash deaths per 100 million miles traveled was much higher in rural areas than in urban areas (1.72 in rural areas compared with 1.19 in urban areas). https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/urban-rural-comparison https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/urban...
  - ahahahahah 3y ago
    > In 2021, the rate of crash deaths per ... That would be relevant if we were talking about crash deaths.
    - h0l0cube 3y ago
      It seems disingenuous to dismiss this offhand as a reasonable proxy for incidents. It would be strange for there to be no correlation between fatal risk of injury, and chance of any injury, or 'incidents'.
      - ejstronge 3y ago
        It is not disingenuous - it is quite clear that the kind of driving that happens in rural settings (fast, two-lane roads, no lights) is different from the kind of driving that happens in cities (slower, larger roads, street lights, stop lights) https://www.mvmlaw.com/blog/do-car-accidents-happen-more-in-rural-or-urban-areas/ https://www.mvmlaw.com/blog/do-car-accidents-happen-more-in-... has multiple links supporting this
        h0l0cube 3y ago
        Absolutely not contesting that 'driving is different', but GP was suggesting that crash deaths doesn't correlate with crashes fatal or otherwise, or at least correlates differently enough between rural and urban. Nothing in that link supports that claim. Intuitively one might say that high velocity crashes could involve more fatalities, but an easy counter to that is that pedestrian deaths would represent more in urban areas.
yumraj 3y ago
Just grabbing at the straws now are we? (To clarify, referring to the comment above, not the study)
spamizbad 3y ago
I'd be skeptical that Tesla vehicles, which are popular in urban areas, would have more miles driven on average than pickup trucks which are more popular (but certainly also present elsewhere) in more rural / exurban areas where travel distances to work and shopping are longer.
- gonzo41 3y ago
  In rural areas you see less traffic. Though tesla's ship with power modes that far exceed the traffic limits in most places so speed may be a contributing factor. Especially in the urban setting. I'm also wondering when the regulation to limit tops speeds in electric cars will occur. It seems inevitable that with the computers onboard the ability to limit speeds based on location data, ie what road you're on, will be here sooner rather than later.

sxp 3y ago

When the opening line is "Just days after Tesla was forced to recall nearly every car it ever made over safety issues involving its Autopilot system..", it's hard to take the rest of the article seriously. The "recall" is actually the NHTSA pushing Tesla to change how they monitor drivers. "The fix will be deployed to roughly two million cars via an over-the-air update that should prevent owners from tricking the system." from TFA's link. The linked LendingTree article actually says "Across 30 car brands analyzed, Ram has the worst drivers. Nationally, Ram drivers had 32.90 driving incidents (accidents, DUIs, speeding and citations) per 1,000 drivers from Nov. 14, 2022, through Nov. 14, 2023. Tesla (31.13) and Subaru (30.09) were the only other brands whose drivers had incident rates above 30.00.". Without further breakdown of accident/incident types and segmentation by gender & age, TheDrive's article is just wild speculation.

h0l0cube 3y ago
The article quotes both ‘accident’ and ‘incident’ rates and explains the distinction: > According to LendingTree, between Nov. 14, 2022, and Nov. 14, 2023, there were 23.54 Tesla accidents per 1,000 drivers. Only two other brands had more than 20 accidents per 1,000 drivers, Ram (22.76) and Subaru (20.90). That accident rate also helped it earn the second-highest incident rate, 31.13, behind only Ram (32.90). The difference between accident rate and incident rate is that the latter also factors DUIs, speeding, and any other citations.
stonogo 3y ago
It's a little weird to discount an article because it accurately reports a fact, using well-defined terms. It's getting exhausting listening to Tesla fans re-prosecute the definition of 'recall' any time someone uses the term correctly.
- pbhjpbhj 3y ago
  I see both sides, a recall is usually a very expensive process of each car returning to a particular car service business and having manual actions performed on it by a mechanic. That might include software updates, plugging in a tool to push an update; but by direct local connection. OTA updates feel different, particularly when the vehicle isn't physically _recalled_ to a manufacturer controlled service space. I'm not that familiar with the recall, would NHTSA have demanded it if it were all Tesla cars being physically recalled? (potentially resulting in the end of Tesla?)

_ea1k 3y ago

It'd be interesting to see more data from this. Were the accidents tied to the specific vehicle? Or to all the vehicles requesting the quote? Also, age and other demographic breakdowns would likely be telling. Seeing RAM at the top gives some clues where that might lead.

acdha 3y ago
That was my first thought, too: I’d love to see it broken down by models - Tesla’s marketing has been about sports car performance so I’d bet that if you broke most of these down more you’d see it’s not the brand but certain buyers. I doubt Subaru Forrester drivers are pushing those numbers up, either.
- pbhjpbhj 3y ago
  Wouldn't you expect supercar brands Ferrari, Zonder (sp?), Lamborghini, etc., to have terrible crash rates? Especially given the small numbers that most be sold. Are they all excluded from the figures?
  - acdha 3y ago
    It’s an interesting question. I’d think that they’d do better because you have to be a serious car nut to want one even if you’re rich whereas it’s not that hard for an irresponsible teenager to get a more normal car. I’d love to test that guess against hard data, however.
  - _ea1k 3y ago
    I'd guess that most of those are owned by older drivers and not driven nearly as much. Most don't rack up tons of miles. Probably accidents per mile would be high, but I doubt accidents per vehicle would be notable.
pbhjpbhj 3y ago
Not being familiar with the USA car market demographics could you suggest how RAM gives clues that we're looking at confounding factors?

psunavy03 3y ago

> Last year, the Department of Justice launched an investigation into Tesla and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) found that 322 frontal and other collisions resulted from Autopilot disengaging. As the recall mentioned above highlights, it was too easy for drivers to leave Tesla's Autopilot on its own and completely relinquish control. We need less technical fixes for things like this and more legal consequences for drivers who are found to have used the system negligently. Want to act like a clown in your self-driving Tesla? Great, you're still responsible for what it does and now you can deal with a criminal conviction, same as someone driving drunk.

ceejayoz 3y ago
We threaten people with death or life in prison and they still do things. I'm skeptical of the ability to prevent bad behavior in this fashion - especially when it's a much greyer area of culpability.
onetimeuse92304 3y ago
Who'd have guessed it is hard to safely transition from not driving/inattentive to driving in an instant while in traffic.
hypeatei 3y ago
This is a general problem in the US because we're so dependent on cars. We're very lax on car deaths / injuries caused by negligence. I think the saying goes "If you're going to kill someone, do it in a car"
Xylakant 3y ago
This will not help. Humans are fundamentally incapable of babysitting repeptitive boring tasks that require interaction only in failure cases. Expecting humans to do so is expecting superhuman capabilities and no amount of threatening the drivers with legal consequencces will change the outcome. All you'll achieve is punishing the poor sobs that trusted teslas marketing stunt. If you want this to change, make Tesla liable and they'll quickly fix this, one way or another.

tqi 3y ago

Great illustration of lying with statistics. This is objectively true, but the conclusions are murky at best. Urban vs highway miles, geographic distribution, driver demographics all almost certainly have more to do with this metric than the car itself.

ripper1138 3y ago

You guys are trying to discredit the statistics here, but anyone in the Bay Area knows this is true. I wish there were stats on “near accidents” because Tesla drivers would be leading that too.

pests 3y ago
My buddy hit a construction barrel the other day with his Tesla on FSD Beta. He never once took ownership and kept referring to his accident as "the car hit the barrel". It doesn't suprise me one bit people get into way more accidents while in a Tesla. I bet if you split further into Tesla's without any autopilot or FSD what so ever, the stat would return to normal. Or on rental Teslas, which are always speed locked to like 80mph / calm mode and no autopilot or FSD features (at least around me.)
thechao 3y ago
I don't have the self-driving feature in my Tesla; I have, however, developed a significant respect for the torque it delivers. It is, by a long margin, the quickest accelerating vehicle I have ever owned. The first three weeks I owned it, I think I nearly hit several cars: you press the accelerator and then you're there. I had to completely retrain myself to drive the car & carefully feather in acceleration.
- hangonhn 3y ago
  I really think this is one of the keys here. People coming from ICE aren't used to that much torque and it comes at the beginning and not the middle of the curve. If the road is even a little wet, I can see how this could be an issue and catch people by surprise. I remember going from a naturally aspirated car to a turbocharged car and getting caught by surprised when it kicked in. I think the surprise for EV drivers might be even worse. Subtle changes like that take time to get used to. I wonder if the statistics can be broken down further into how long someone has driven an EV and see if a different pattern emerges.
- vl 3y ago
  This is why my M3P is in the chill mode. Sport mode is too jumpy and uncomfortable to drive.

soliton4 3y ago

am i the only one who expected a review of device drivers provided by tesla?

JumpinJack_Cash 3y ago

[flagged]

onethought 3y ago
But they made an electric car. That did revolutionise the industry. There is a bunch of non-auto pilot innovations they’ve made as well.
- JumpinJack_Cash 3y ago
  > > But they made an electric car. That did revolutionise the industry. That is what I meant by re-inventing the wheel for political purposes. The consumer doesn't care about the type of propellent the car uses, it was an imposition from the above which raised the price of cars and reduced their range and aestetics because of batteries design constraints. Tesla specifically also have very poor interior design and quality of materials.
  - _ea1k 3y ago
    I've never met a Tesla owner that bought because a politician told them to.
    - JumpinJack_Cash 3y ago
      No they buy because techno-utopian cult leader Elon Musk told them so, the political handouts just gave them an extra 8000$ reasons to make it palatable to the family budget to buy a go kart for rich people.
      - _ea1k 3y ago
        Some of their best years in the US were years when the tax credit wasn't available. Interest rates were a lot lower back then, though, which makes a surprisingly big difference.
      - onethought 3y ago

1-6 3y ago

> Tesla's Autopilot and its Autosteer feature could be why Tesla is so crash-prone. I disagree with this statement. I think the greater issue is that suddenly, you’ve you’ve given every Tesla owner a car that can accelerate to the equivalent of a base Porsche 911 or better. Most people (I include myself) will not responsibly handle this much power.

kulahan 3y ago
I think a lot about those videos where someone gets their first mustang and absolutely RIP out of the parking lot, only to total the car 50 yards down the road, and imagine if every toyota camry out there had that kind of power.
h0l0cube 3y ago
Then you could see this borne out in the data with other EV sthat feature a similar acceleration (and demographic) profile. But I think it’s both, but acceleration is harder to control with legislation.. maybe a limit in urban areas?
- aziaziazi 3y ago
  Not sure if I infesterions your comment, but can’t we use torque here as an acceleration proxy ?
- _ea1k 3y ago
  That's possible. This data doesn't break it down by model, but it might even be true. No other make would be as heavily influenced by it as Tesla. EVs are less than 10% of sales for most other makes, so the impact would be nearly negligible.
- rolldat777 3y ago
  There is already legislation about acceleration, it falls under e.g. 'exhibition of speed' and everyone one of these modern EVs is able to violate it (and do regularly, afaict).
  - 3y ago

justrealist 3y ago

The average Tesla is very new and pretty expensive (incl to repair) so I'm kind of wondering whether Tesla owners are just more likely to report minor accidents they can get covered by insurance. When I drove an old Mazda I didn't bother reporting anything short of catastrophic damage (obv if I caused an accident for someone else I'd report)... I don't think that's true for someone driving a new Model Y.

kube-system 3y ago

Doing this by brand seems to skew the numbers towards brands with model lineups that attract certain types of buyers, and their inherent behaviors, rather than on the merits of the vehicle. For example, the bottom of the list is not filled with brands with a lot of safety features, it is filled with brands that predominantly don't (/didn't) target riskier groups of drivers. People who buy boring vehicles drive differently than people who buy powerful and exciting vehicles. There is self-selection at play here.

cbsmith 3y ago
Yes. The driver is invariably the most important variable.

015a 3y ago

This is confusing: Tesla publishes that Tesla's vehicles, both with and without autopilot, are the subject of substantially fewer accidents per million miles driven than the US average; last quarter, somewhere ~4.8M miles/accident on autopilot, ~1.5M miles/accident Tesla w/o autopilot, and ~0.5M miles/accident US average. Given I'd like to assume the best and conclude no one is lying here; obviously what they're measuring is slightly different, but it feels like they're similar enough that we shouldn't be getting entirely opposite outcomes. Do Tesla drivers drive substantially more? Are Tesla drivers just more likely to report crashes to their insurance/police (versus, Tesla's data is probably from automated internal observability)? If Tesla's data is based on internal observability, is that observability underreporting incidents to the mothership? [1] https://www.tesla.com/VehicleSafetyReport https://www.tesla.com/VehicleSafetyReport

_ea1k 3y ago
This is specifically among people who are shopping for insurance. There will naturally be biases in the data.
clouddrover 3y ago
> Given I'd like to assume the best and conclude no one is lying here That's a bad assumption. Tesla routinely lies about everything from full self-driving to price to quarter mile times. It's built into the company's DNA.

ChrisArchitect 3y ago

[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38690496 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38690496