10 ms·

How do cars do in out-of-sample crash testing? (2020)

86 points by surprisetalk 2y ago

bryanrasmussen 2y ago
>Checking to see if crash tests are being gamed with hyper-specific optimizations isn't really feasible for someone who isn't a billionaire. hmm, operation "Trick Elon into Wasting His Money" has published its latest trick!
- Etheryte 2y ago
  > In a 2024 analysis of fatality rate per mile driven from 2018-2022, the worst car manufacturers were, starting from the worst, were Tesla, Kia, Buick, Dodge, and then Hyundai. I don't think this is a tree Elon wants to be barking at too loudly. But then again, you never know, every time I read the news I can't tell whether I'm reading The Onion or not.
  - potato3732842 2y ago
    >he worst car manufacturers were, starting from the worst, were Tesla, Kia, Buick, Dodge, and then Hyundai. Look at that list of brands though. You'd have to have to be blinded by motivated reasoning to not think that who buys what might have more than a little bit to do with it. Edit: Just to be clear, I say this not in defense of any particular brand but in offense of anyone who engages in naive surface level assessment.
    - close04 2y ago
      I'd be very interested in a "deaths by weight class" comparison too. Size and weight are huge factors in an accident. I'm not at all surprised if a Kia Rio is a death trap in an accident facing most likely an SUV twice the weight. I am surprised to see Tesla at the top of the fatalities chart though, punching a few weight categories above your average Kia.
    - nemomarx 2y ago
      Maybe I'm missing something, what's the commonality? I thought Kia had a reputation for cheap compact cars, Dodge for trucks, Hyundai I hear of in the same conversation as Toyota, etc. They seem like they all target different markets? And certainly Tesla's aren't cheap right?
      - potato3732842 2y ago
        It's not commonality, it's that even if like for like the vehicles are equivalent or even safer there's selection bias at play as a result of what they sell and who they sell it to. To use a very broad brush: People who buy Tesla sedans are basically the "german car weaving with no blinker" demographics of yesteryear so if someone's gonna hit a pole at 100 it'll be them. Buick sells pretty safe stuff to pretty conservative buyers buy they skew toward age where they'd keel over from an open hand slap so surviving more than a fender bender isn't likely and they're exactly the kind of people who are gonna get t-boned at 60 by something they just didn't see. Dodge basically sells Challengers and Chargers these days (Ram is separate brand for the timeline listed) and the stereotype seems to generally check out. Hyundai and Kia are kind of the odd ones out but they sell a lot of low end and small stuff which doesn't exactly attract the least risky buyer demographics and the cars aren't exactly loaded with safety themselves. The comparison really needs to be done on a higher resolution otherwise you get stuff like Volvo and Lexus looking artificially good because of course nobody dies in high end SUVs and sedans driven mostly by people of non-risky age and decent means and Ford and GM look good because they sell god knows how many fleet vehicles that only get driven responsibly on the clock and it's kind of hard to kill yourself in a 3/4 ton pickup anyway.
        coredog64 2y ago
        I’m wondering if the “Kia Boys” phenomenon moves the needle of fatality rates.
        Interesco 2y ago
        This is what I was wondering - around me, many of these cars were stolen by kids under 16 with no drivers license. I know of a few cases where they crashed on the highway killing 3+.
    - foooorsyth 2y ago
      Driver demographics play a huge factor (young men are the deadliest drivers). Also, the makeup of your vehicle lineup skews the numbers. Small crossovers are the deadliest vehicles (low mass, prone to rollover). Tesla’s lineup is small (only 5 vehicles) and the Model Y dominates sales numbers. That hurts their overall fatality per mile number. Looking at real world results is still important. The BMW F10 530i had zero worldwide fatalities over its entire production. Results like that should speak more than contrived sled tests.
  - infecto 2y ago
    Unfortunately I have a hard time following the data for that quote. I wonder if he simply averaged out numbers but he also does not cite sources and instead he just has a circular link, the html writeup links to mastodon which links to his article. On the model ranking the Honda CRV Hyrbid comes ahead of a model y.
  - deleted 2y ago
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david-gpu 2y ago
I wish car testing was less about the safety of the people inside of the car and more about the safety of the people outside of it, like pedestrians, cyclists and other vehicles. After all, people buying a car already have a strong incentive to purchase something that is safe for themselves, but how many people put any thought into reducing the risk that the force upon others? For context, pedestrian and cycling deaths have increased for the past decade in North America [0] and it is known that tall blunt hoods increase fatalities [1]. Yet, nothing is being done about it in NA as far as I know. [0] https://www.npr.org/2023/06/26/1184034017/us-pedestrian-deaths-high-traffic-car https://www.npr.org/2023/06/26/1184034017/us-pedestrian-deat... [1] https://youtube.com/watch?v=YpuX-5E7xoU https://youtube.com/watch?v=YpuX-5E7xoU
- grecy 2y ago
  Pedestrian safety is a very big part of European car crash testing - some cars even have front / hood airbags that will deploy for pedestrians.
- foooorsyth 2y ago
  https://www.euroncap.com/en/car-safety/the-ratings-explained/vulnerable-road-user-vru-protection/ https://www.euroncap.com/en/car-safety/the-ratings-explained... NCAP has a dedicated test battery. Pedestrian figures are alarming, but I doubt vehicle mass and shape are the largest factor contributing to their rise. The numbers have increased since 2009. Smart phones and distracted driving are a huge factor here. That combined with NA’s terrible pedestrian infrastructure is a terrible combination. The fastest way to curtail pedestrian deaths is to build real pedestrian infrastructure and get serious about anti-cell phone technology for the driver’s seat. Edit: Oh, also several NA cities just stopped enforcing all traffic laws post summer 2020. Can’t ignore that in the post pandemic spike.
  - close04 2y ago
    > I doubt vehicle mass and shape are the largest factor contributing to their rise. Distracted driving might be the biggest factor but it's hard to prevent a human from being distracted. It's easy to make smaller cars, we used to have them. The shape most definitely has a large impact (pun intended). The visibility from recent SUVs and trucks is abysmal without extensive assistance, like sensors and cameras. [0] Sometimes those cameras and sensors are another source of distraction and increase the cognitive load for what used to be "just look ahead", leading to the distracted driving. > examined that front visibility with a group of elementary school children, ages 6 to 10, and several adults of different heights in the driver’s seat of four tall, square-hooded vehicles: Ford F-150 and Toyota Tundra pickup trucks and Cadillac Escalade and Jeep Wagoneer SUVs. With the kids seated in a line stretching forward from the vehicle’s front bumper, it took nine to 11 of them before a 5-foot-2 driver could see a child’s head [0] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/americas-cars-trucks-are-getting-bigger-are-front-blind-zones-children-rcna52109 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/americas-cars-trucks-ar...
taeric 2y ago
Spending a little time in Japan, it is hard not to see the general difference in size of vehicle compared to what I'm used to seeing in the US. I'm incredibly curious to know if other nations have similarly small cars compared to the states? I'm also very curious on other impacts the vehicle sizes have on things. Easy to think it contributes to so many cyclist with basically no helmets. Curious if data backs that.
- KineticLensman 2y ago
  (Brit here) Europe in general has smaller cars than the US – here’s an Economist article [0] that claims ours are 20% smaller. I personally find it interesting that to many Brits, ‘truck’ means something like a semi, not a F-150. One factor here in the UK is that many of our cities and towns predate cars (sometimes by centuries) and consequently the roads and streets are much smaller. Such that giant cars are a real nuisance for both the driver and everyone else. But there is a definite trend toward larger vehicles, as can be seen by how difficult it is to get them into older parking infrastructure. [0] https://archive.vn/wusnE https://archive.vn/wusnE
  - arethuza 2y ago
    It's not just cities and towns, a lot of rural areas (particularly in Scotland) have single track roads with passing spaces i.e. a single lane, not a single lane in both directions.
- YokoZar 2y ago
  Japan has vehicle weight taxes, which directly incentivizes what you observed there.
- steveBK123 2y ago
  These comparisons are always interesting because there are malevolent assumptions one can make about US car size, but there are also Occam's razor convenience aspects / differences in demographics. Compare to Europe and Japan, US has - MUCH lower energy costs, larger family sizes, much further travel distances, and smaller % of population in pre-modern urban areas with pre-automobile sized roads. Add to that a less top-down centralized government in the US and the resulting lack of mass transit, particularly inter-city, and you end up with more people, driving bigger cars, further.
cmiller1 2y ago
I'm surprised the "Actual vehicle tested may be different" section didn't mention the alleged fraud Ford engaged in with the 2015 F150 where they welded in extra crash safety bars only on specific configurations out of the factory... that just happened to be the exact configurations that were being sent to the IIHS for crash testing.
- potato3732842 2y ago
  Did they add extra bars for the purpose of gaming the tests or did they add extra bars and then whoever chose what to send for the tests picked the obvious best choice?
  - cmiller1 2y ago
    They knew which configuration would be sent for the tests because IIHS required it be the most "commonly sold" config, so they picked a specific supercrew model that made up about 70% of their sales to bump up the safety on.
    - ndileas 2y ago
      That's not ideal, but.... If you want more safety, you should want ford to do stuff like this. From the way it was phrased, I was imagining they added extra bars only to the actual cars sent for testing. This is them following the incentives and making their customers safer as a result; a win for safety testing. Obviously it would be better if they had a deep commitment to safety and made every variation of every model maximally safe. But I'll take it. No such thing as absolute safety, so moves in a better direction are good.
- eleveriven 2y ago
  And while crash tests are a useful tool, they might not fully represent a vehicle’s real-world performance (this can be as a prove)
PaulHoule 2y ago
I can offer two takes on the IIHS: (1) A remarkable example of a private agency that has pushed safety standards beyond what the government would do own its own, and (2) An organization that has persuaded Americans to buy larger vehicles than they would have otherwise with all the associated costs (e.g. the “affordable car” crisis) and risks (to pedestrians.) The IIHS is an organization of insurers so they are particularly concerned about quantifiable monetary costs. And when it comes to that much more of the benefit of larger vehicles is in avoided minor injuries such as broken bones which are more common than death and life changing injuries. The public focuses on the latter and the psychology is such that some people will spend another $50k on some German vehicle and spend the rest of their days at the dealer getting it fixed or subject their children to the trauma of riding in a minivan. (To generation X the minivan is like the toxic PFAS GenX) IIHS claims that compatibility has improved between large and small vehicles but that large vehicles are still a menace to other road users https://www.iihs.org/topics/vehicle-size-and-weight https://www.iihs.org/topics/vehicle-size-and-weight
- potato3732842 2y ago
  I wish they'd lean on the NHTSA better rules for bumper positioning. It'd save consumers a hell of a lot of money if things matched up better so that the most common sorts of minor bump accidents were more frequently bumper to bumper. Maybe now that we live in the age of 1k/corner head and tail lights it'll happen...
xpe 2y ago
From the "Bonus: reputation" section: > As we've seen over the past few years, loudly proclaiming something, regardless of whether or not it's true, even when there's incontrovertible evidence that it's untrue, seems to not only work, that kind of bombastic rhetoric appears to attract superfans who will aggressively defend the brand. What does by Dann Luu mean by "loudly proclaiming something, regardless of truth, [seems to work]"? Let's try to make the claim more precise and testable. Since I'm interested in the broader claim, let me "carve out" (put aside) Dan's specific point about attracting superfans, which I find persuasive. With that said, here are some attempts to reframe the broad claim: Reframing #1: "Some people are persuaded of false things when a company loudly proclaims them." Yes, this seems obvious. But it isn't particularly useful in guiding action. The claim doesn't say anything quantitative. Reframing #2: "On net, the accuracy of a population's belief goes down when a company loudly proclaims a false belief." Maybe, maybe not. I would expect it largely depends on what happens next; i.e. whether there is some kind of response. Here are two kinds of reactions that favor not lying. First, getting caught in a lie can damage brand reputation. Second, lying calls more attention to an issue which would have otherwise drifted out of public awareness as the news cycle churns. These depend on how much credibility people assign to the organization and their claims. Reframing #3: "On net, it is in an organization's self-interest to loudly proclaim a falsehood about its quality." Maybe. It depends on many factors. This is the most interesting public policy question! If such a tactic works (see reframing #2 above), it is clearly a negative externality (a downstream effect than an actor does not feel directly). How does wise public policy address externalities? One classic way is to internalize the cost -- by making the actor feel the pain themself. In #3 above, one way to internalize the externality would be to impose some penalty or cost for lying. How to do this in a targeted, effective, non-delayed, and legal way is non-obvious to me. By non-delayed I mean temporally-immediate consequences provide better signal to correct a decision. This isn't just human nature; it is fundamental to the credit-assignment problem in reinforcement learning. The problem of delayed feedback goes deeper than just credit-assignment; it has to do with fairness too. Often, the decision-maker isn't a monolith: the leadership composition changes over time. It may be impractical to punish one cog in the system without imposing a cost on the rest of the system, many of whom had nothing to do with the decision.
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porphyra 2y ago
Tesla aced another independent out-of-sample crash test [1]. The danluu article also mentions an iSeeCars report at the bottom that says that Teslas have a high amount of fatalities per mile driven [2]. However, while they claim to be using official US estimates of fatalities data, they normalized it with estimated mileage using unknown proprietary iSeeCars data: > iSeeCars analyzed fatality data from the U.S. Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS). Only cars from model years 2018-2022 in crashes that resulted in occupant fatalities between 2017 and 2022 (the latest year data was available) were included in the analysis. To adjust for exposure, the number of cars involved in a fatal crash were normalized by the total number of vehicle miles driven, which was estimated from iSeeCars’ data of over 8 million vehicles on the road in 2022 from model years 2018-2022. Heavy-duty trucks and vans, models not in production as of the 2024 model year, and low-volume models were removed from further analysis. Some numbers are also surprising, such as the Model Y having almost twice the fatality rate (10.6 per billion miles) as the Tesla average (5.6) --- suggesting that there's a wide gulf between it and the Model 3 in terms of fatality rates, which seems difficult to explain. Ultimately, iSeeCars is a small VC-funded startup with very few people and so it is unclear if their methodology is actually good or not. For a better blog post about whether Teslas are safe, here's a post from Brandon Paddock [3] from a year ago, which seems more or less objective and unsurprising. Here is the conclusion that he drew upon analyzing the FARS data: > Tesla’s fatal accident rate is nearly identical to that of the Audi A4 series, and far lower than a standard Ford mid-size sedan. In this case, the Ford’s accident rate is more than 4 times higher than the Tesla Model 3. [1] https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-model-3-aces-safety-tests-china-video https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-model-3-aces-safety-tests-ch... [2] https://www.iseecars.com/most-dangerous-cars-study https://www.iseecars.com/most-dangerous-cars-study [3] https://brandonpaddock.substack.com/p/are-teslas-the-most-or-least-safe https://brandonpaddock.substack.com/p/are-teslas-the-most-or...
- two_handfuls 2y ago
  > Some numbers are also surprising, such as the Model Y having almost twice the fatality rate (10.6 per billion miles) as the Tesla average (5.6) My guess is that is due to higher average occupancy for model Y vs model 3.
ggreer 2y ago
The 2024 update in this post (which claims the worst brands are Tesla, Kia, Buick, Dodge, and then Hyundai, in that order) uses data from an iSeeCars blog post[1], which claims to have gotten their data from the U.S. Fatality Analysis Reporting System[2]. There's one important detail they mention in the blog post: > To adjust for exposure, the number of cars involved in a fatal crash were normalized by the total number of vehicle miles driven, which was estimated from iSeeCars’ data of over 8 million vehicles on the road in 2022 from model years 2018-2022. Note that the mileage data for each model comes from iSeeCars, not FARS. We don't know how accurate it is. There could be selection effects because iSeeCars only gets odometer data for cars that are for sale or have been sold, not vehicles that people keep. If for example, someone reserved a Model Y and sold it above the original price as soon as they got it (a common practice for new Tesla models), and the second owner kept the car indefinitely, iSeeCars would only see the odometer reading at the early sale. Tesla mileage would also skew low in sales data for anyone who bought an electric car, then regretted it for one reason or another, and exchanged it for a gas car. And since the rate they are measuring is fatalities per vehicle mile traveled, not per passenger mile traveled, any model that tends to contain more people will skew higher in the stats. If you query FARS data to get all Teslas involved in occupant fatalities from 2018-2022, there are 141.[3] If you split out the data by model, there were a total of 22 Model Ys involved in occupant fatalities from 2018-2022 (actually 2020-2022, as the Model Y was released in 2020). If there were 10.6 Model Ys involved per billion miles, then (according to iSeeCars) the total number of miles traveled by Model Ys was 2.07 billion. By the end of 2022, the US had approximately 484,100 Model Ys on the road.[4] If you divide the total vehicle miles traveled by the number of vehicles, then the average Model Y had less than 4,300 miles on its odometer. That seems suspiciously low, as Tesla's 2021 report put the average Model Y at 13,000-14,000 miles per year.[5] This artifact in mis-measuring mileage would also explain why other recently released models seem to have high fatality rates. The Honda CRV Hybrid was released in 2020. The Buick Encore GX was released in 2020. US production of the Hyundai Venue didn't ramp up until 2020. The Toyota Corolla Hybrid was released in 2019. Most people who buy a new car either sell it quickly (because they dislike it and want something else), or they keep it until it gets old. So anyone collecting milage data from car sales will have data that is skewed low for new models because the higher mileage sales haven't happened yet. It may be the case that I'm using different reports than iSeeCars did. It's hard to know whether they're looking at vehicles involved in fatal crashes, drivers involved in fatal crashes, drivers killed in fatal crashes, occupants involved in fatal crashes, or occupants killed in fatal crashes. FARS lets you query all of these, and the iSeeCars post doesn't make it clear which data they used. Another odd thing about the iSeeCars data is that they claim an average of 2.8 vehicles involved in a fatal accident for every billion miles traveled. But in 2022, the US had 13.3 deaths per billion miles traveled by car. Unless the average accident involves 5 fatalities, it seems to me that the iSeeCars data has some significant issues. 1. https://www.iseecars.com/most-dangerous-cars-study#v=2024 https://www.iseecars.com/most-dangerous-cars-study#v=2024 2. https://www.nhtsa.gov/research-data/fatality-analysis-reporting-system-fars https://www.nhtsa.gov/research-data/fatality-analysis-report... 3. https://cdan.dot.gov/query https://cdan.dot.gov/query I don't know how long they retain generated reports for, but mine was available at https://cdan.dot.gov/files/files/b14dcfb4-1f45-4eeb-abda-744a1818d03a/content https://cdan.dot.gov/files/files/b14dcfb4-1f45-4eeb-abda-744... when I made this comment. 4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Model_Y#Sales https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Model_Y#Sales states 172,700 sold in 2021 and 231,400 in 2022. Other estimates put around 80,000 sold in 2020, for a total of 484,100. 5. See page 79 of https://www.tesla.com/ns_videos/2021-tesla-impact-report.pdf https://www.tesla.com/ns_videos/2021-tesla-impact-report.pdf
chiph 2y ago
I haven't seen anyone talk about how the fleet of cars on US roads is now older than ever. Approximately 12 years now. That's 12 years of safety engineering improvements that aren't there. I am not advocating for government handouts or another "cash for clunkers" program to get them off the roads. But I think it's something that people should consider when shopping for a used vehicle.
- WarOnPrivacy 2y ago
  > That's 12 years of safety engineering improvements that aren't there. The last 12 years mostly replaced attention-preserving tactile controls with attention-demanding screens. Coexisting with that decreased ability is a race-to-the bottom where new vehicles kill visibility for everyone else (headlights blind ahead; oversizing erases visibility of every car around). I have never felt less safe on the road. And for the privilege, everyone's insurance rates climb and climb and climb - unreasonably punishing people who don't drive super-expensive-to-repair vehicles.
  - chiph 2y ago
    You'll get no argument from me how automobile control system ergonomics have gone to shit. But I was thinking more about passive safety improvements from body structure engineering and auto-braking systems.
  - Der_Einzige 2y ago
    You're so full of it and people like you coming and acting like we haven't objectively improved things do not help anyone at all. In the last 12 years we have seen the following: 1. Further proliferation of 360 cameras, blind spot monitors, rear and front cameras, digital rear view mirrors, and even some vehicles with in-dash blind-spot cameras and including them down-market. This directly translates to fewer fatalities, especially of children. 2. Further proliferation of HUDs and including them down-market, including augmented reality HUDs from the germans, allowing drivers to keep their eyes on the road for a larger percentage of the drive. This directly translates to fewer fatalities per mile 3. Better auto-high beam systems, including truly amazing systems from the Germans (to reduce the dazzle issue you brought up above). Also down-market movement of things like auto-turning lights to improve safety of turning at night. 4. Huge improvements in automatic front and rear emergency braking, including for people, cyclists, and children. This is likely the most impactful, and has massively reduced deaths, and minimized the harm of situations that do become harmful. 5. Some cars have automatic evasive turn systems, which occasionally intervene and prevent crashes before they happen similar to 4. 6. Some newer cars have safety stuff like automatic crash based loud noise systems (prepare ears for crash), automatic crash based seat belt pre-tension systems and similar systems to mitigate crash damage. Onstar automatically calls emergency services regardless if you pay and speeds up ambulance and thus life-saving care. 7. Carplay/Android Auto means less time fumbling with deciding where to go. Huge amounts of distraction caused by shit infotainment systems. So done with people acting like driving is worse because we took 1 or 2 steps back for every 7 we take forward. Ludditism is the human death drive externalized in a lesser form.
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avar 2y ago
An excellent overview, one thing I'd like to take issue with is this: We can also observe that, in the IIHS analysis, many factors that one might want to control for aren't [...] One way to see that the numbers are heavily influenced by confounding factors is by looking at AWD or 4WD vs. 2WD versions of cars. They often have wildly different fatalty rates even though the safety differences are not very large (and the difference is often in favor of the 2WD vehicle). Some plausible causes of that are random noise, differences in who buys different versions of the same vehicle, and differences in how the vehicle are used. I have no idea why that is either, but the author is surprising confident in declaring AWD a confounding variable, especially after the earlier "Actual vehicle tested may be different" point they made. A typical AWD will have a transfer case, front driveshaft and other front drivetrain components v.s. a sister car in a 2WD configuration. The overall weight and distribution will be different. One might e.g. suspect that in a crash the front driveshaft might fold upwards and assist in structurally compromising the passenger cabin.

86 points by surprisetalk 2y ago

>Checking to see if crash tests are being gamed with hyper-specific optimizations isn't really feasible for someone who isn't a billionaire. hmm, operation "Trick Elon into Wasting His Money" has published its latest trick!

Etheryte 2y ago
> In a 2024 analysis of fatality rate per mile driven from 2018-2022, the worst car manufacturers were, starting from the worst, were Tesla, Kia, Buick, Dodge, and then Hyundai. I don't think this is a tree Elon wants to be barking at too loudly. But then again, you never know, every time I read the news I can't tell whether I'm reading The Onion or not.
- potato3732842 2y ago
  >he worst car manufacturers were, starting from the worst, were Tesla, Kia, Buick, Dodge, and then Hyundai. Look at that list of brands though. You'd have to have to be blinded by motivated reasoning to not think that who buys what might have more than a little bit to do with it. Edit: Just to be clear, I say this not in defense of any particular brand but in offense of anyone who engages in naive surface level assessment.
  - close04 2y ago
    I'd be very interested in a "deaths by weight class" comparison too. Size and weight are huge factors in an accident. I'm not at all surprised if a Kia Rio is a death trap in an accident facing most likely an SUV twice the weight. I am surprised to see Tesla at the top of the fatalities chart though, punching a few weight categories above your average Kia.
  - nemomarx 2y ago
    Maybe I'm missing something, what's the commonality? I thought Kia had a reputation for cheap compact cars, Dodge for trucks, Hyundai I hear of in the same conversation as Toyota, etc. They seem like they all target different markets? And certainly Tesla's aren't cheap right?
    - potato3732842 2y ago
      It's not commonality, it's that even if like for like the vehicles are equivalent or even safer there's selection bias at play as a result of what they sell and who they sell it to. To use a very broad brush: People who buy Tesla sedans are basically the "german car weaving with no blinker" demographics of yesteryear so if someone's gonna hit a pole at 100 it'll be them. Buick sells pretty safe stuff to pretty conservative buyers buy they skew toward age where they'd keel over from an open hand slap so surviving more than a fender bender isn't likely and they're exactly the kind of people who are gonna get t-boned at 60 by something they just didn't see. Dodge basically sells Challengers and Chargers these days (Ram is separate brand for the timeline listed) and the stereotype seems to generally check out. Hyundai and Kia are kind of the odd ones out but they sell a lot of low end and small stuff which doesn't exactly attract the least risky buyer demographics and the cars aren't exactly loaded with safety themselves. The comparison really needs to be done on a higher resolution otherwise you get stuff like Volvo and Lexus looking artificially good because of course nobody dies in high end SUVs and sedans driven mostly by people of non-risky age and decent means and Ford and GM look good because they sell god knows how many fleet vehicles that only get driven responsibly on the clock and it's kind of hard to kill yourself in a 3/4 ton pickup anyway.
      - coredog64 2y ago
        I’m wondering if the “Kia Boys” phenomenon moves the needle of fatality rates.
        Interesco 2y ago
        This is what I was wondering - around me, many of these cars were stolen by kids under 16 with no drivers license. I know of a few cases where they crashed on the highway killing 3+.
  - foooorsyth 2y ago
    Driver demographics play a huge factor (young men are the deadliest drivers). Also, the makeup of your vehicle lineup skews the numbers. Small crossovers are the deadliest vehicles (low mass, prone to rollover). Tesla’s lineup is small (only 5 vehicles) and the Model Y dominates sales numbers. That hurts their overall fatality per mile number. Looking at real world results is still important. The BMW F10 530i had zero worldwide fatalities over its entire production. Results like that should speak more than contrived sled tests.
- infecto 2y ago
  Unfortunately I have a hard time following the data for that quote. I wonder if he simply averaged out numbers but he also does not cite sources and instead he just has a circular link, the html writeup links to mastodon which links to his article. On the model ranking the Honda CRV Hyrbid comes ahead of a model y.
- deleted 2y ago
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david-gpu 2y ago

I wish car testing was less about the safety of the people inside of the car and more about the safety of the people outside of it, like pedestrians, cyclists and other vehicles. After all, people buying a car already have a strong incentive to purchase something that is safe for themselves, but how many people put any thought into reducing the risk that the force upon others? For context, pedestrian and cycling deaths have increased for the past decade in North America [0] and it is known that tall blunt hoods increase fatalities [1]. Yet, nothing is being done about it in NA as far as I know. [0] https://www.npr.org/2023/06/26/1184034017/us-pedestrian-deaths-high-traffic-car https://www.npr.org/2023/06/26/1184034017/us-pedestrian-deat... [1] https://youtube.com/watch?v=YpuX-5E7xoU https://youtube.com/watch?v=YpuX-5E7xoU

grecy 2y ago
Pedestrian safety is a very big part of European car crash testing - some cars even have front / hood airbags that will deploy for pedestrians.
foooorsyth 2y ago
https://www.euroncap.com/en/car-safety/the-ratings-explained/vulnerable-road-user-vru-protection/ https://www.euroncap.com/en/car-safety/the-ratings-explained... NCAP has a dedicated test battery. Pedestrian figures are alarming, but I doubt vehicle mass and shape are the largest factor contributing to their rise. The numbers have increased since 2009. Smart phones and distracted driving are a huge factor here. That combined with NA’s terrible pedestrian infrastructure is a terrible combination. The fastest way to curtail pedestrian deaths is to build real pedestrian infrastructure and get serious about anti-cell phone technology for the driver’s seat. Edit: Oh, also several NA cities just stopped enforcing all traffic laws post summer 2020. Can’t ignore that in the post pandemic spike.
- close04 2y ago
  > I doubt vehicle mass and shape are the largest factor contributing to their rise. Distracted driving might be the biggest factor but it's hard to prevent a human from being distracted. It's easy to make smaller cars, we used to have them. The shape most definitely has a large impact (pun intended). The visibility from recent SUVs and trucks is abysmal without extensive assistance, like sensors and cameras. [0] Sometimes those cameras and sensors are another source of distraction and increase the cognitive load for what used to be "just look ahead", leading to the distracted driving. > examined that front visibility with a group of elementary school children, ages 6 to 10, and several adults of different heights in the driver’s seat of four tall, square-hooded vehicles: Ford F-150 and Toyota Tundra pickup trucks and Cadillac Escalade and Jeep Wagoneer SUVs. With the kids seated in a line stretching forward from the vehicle’s front bumper, it took nine to 11 of them before a 5-foot-2 driver could see a child’s head [0] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/americas-cars-trucks-are-getting-bigger-are-front-blind-zones-children-rcna52109 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/americas-cars-trucks-ar...

taeric 2y ago

Spending a little time in Japan, it is hard not to see the general difference in size of vehicle compared to what I'm used to seeing in the US. I'm incredibly curious to know if other nations have similarly small cars compared to the states? I'm also very curious on other impacts the vehicle sizes have on things. Easy to think it contributes to so many cyclist with basically no helmets. Curious if data backs that.

KineticLensman 2y ago
(Brit here) Europe in general has smaller cars than the US – here’s an Economist article [0] that claims ours are 20% smaller. I personally find it interesting that to many Brits, ‘truck’ means something like a semi, not a F-150. One factor here in the UK is that many of our cities and towns predate cars (sometimes by centuries) and consequently the roads and streets are much smaller. Such that giant cars are a real nuisance for both the driver and everyone else. But there is a definite trend toward larger vehicles, as can be seen by how difficult it is to get them into older parking infrastructure. [0] https://archive.vn/wusnE https://archive.vn/wusnE
- arethuza 2y ago
  It's not just cities and towns, a lot of rural areas (particularly in Scotland) have single track roads with passing spaces i.e. a single lane, not a single lane in both directions.
YokoZar 2y ago
Japan has vehicle weight taxes, which directly incentivizes what you observed there.
steveBK123 2y ago
These comparisons are always interesting because there are malevolent assumptions one can make about US car size, but there are also Occam's razor convenience aspects / differences in demographics. Compare to Europe and Japan, US has - MUCH lower energy costs, larger family sizes, much further travel distances, and smaller % of population in pre-modern urban areas with pre-automobile sized roads. Add to that a less top-down centralized government in the US and the resulting lack of mass transit, particularly inter-city, and you end up with more people, driving bigger cars, further.

cmiller1 2y ago

I'm surprised the "Actual vehicle tested may be different" section didn't mention the alleged fraud Ford engaged in with the 2015 F150 where they welded in extra crash safety bars only on specific configurations out of the factory... that just happened to be the exact configurations that were being sent to the IIHS for crash testing.

potato3732842 2y ago
Did they add extra bars for the purpose of gaming the tests or did they add extra bars and then whoever chose what to send for the tests picked the obvious best choice?
- cmiller1 2y ago
  They knew which configuration would be sent for the tests because IIHS required it be the most "commonly sold" config, so they picked a specific supercrew model that made up about 70% of their sales to bump up the safety on.
  - ndileas 2y ago
    That's not ideal, but.... If you want more safety, you should want ford to do stuff like this. From the way it was phrased, I was imagining they added extra bars only to the actual cars sent for testing. This is them following the incentives and making their customers safer as a result; a win for safety testing. Obviously it would be better if they had a deep commitment to safety and made every variation of every model maximally safe. But I'll take it. No such thing as absolute safety, so moves in a better direction are good.
eleveriven 2y ago
And while crash tests are a useful tool, they might not fully represent a vehicle’s real-world performance (this can be as a prove)

PaulHoule 2y ago

I can offer two takes on the IIHS: (1) A remarkable example of a private agency that has pushed safety standards beyond what the government would do own its own, and (2) An organization that has persuaded Americans to buy larger vehicles than they would have otherwise with all the associated costs (e.g. the “affordable car” crisis) and risks (to pedestrians.) The IIHS is an organization of insurers so they are particularly concerned about quantifiable monetary costs. And when it comes to that much more of the benefit of larger vehicles is in avoided minor injuries such as broken bones which are more common than death and life changing injuries. The public focuses on the latter and the psychology is such that some people will spend another $50k on some German vehicle and spend the rest of their days at the dealer getting it fixed or subject their children to the trauma of riding in a minivan. (To generation X the minivan is like the toxic PFAS GenX) IIHS claims that compatibility has improved between large and small vehicles but that large vehicles are still a menace to other road users https://www.iihs.org/topics/vehicle-size-and-weight https://www.iihs.org/topics/vehicle-size-and-weight

potato3732842 2y ago
I wish they'd lean on the NHTSA better rules for bumper positioning. It'd save consumers a hell of a lot of money if things matched up better so that the most common sorts of minor bump accidents were more frequently bumper to bumper. Maybe now that we live in the age of 1k/corner head and tail lights it'll happen...

xpe 2y ago

From the "Bonus: reputation" section: > As we've seen over the past few years, loudly proclaiming something, regardless of whether or not it's true, even when there's incontrovertible evidence that it's untrue, seems to not only work, that kind of bombastic rhetoric appears to attract superfans who will aggressively defend the brand. What does by Dann Luu mean by "loudly proclaiming something, regardless of truth, [seems to work]"? Let's try to make the claim more precise and testable. Since I'm interested in the broader claim, let me "carve out" (put aside) Dan's specific point about attracting superfans, which I find persuasive. With that said, here are some attempts to reframe the broad claim: Reframing #1: "Some people are persuaded of false things when a company loudly proclaims them." Yes, this seems obvious. But it isn't particularly useful in guiding action. The claim doesn't say anything quantitative. Reframing #2: "On net, the accuracy of a population's belief goes down when a company loudly proclaims a false belief." Maybe, maybe not. I would expect it largely depends on what happens next; i.e. whether there is some kind of response. Here are two kinds of reactions that favor not lying. First, getting caught in a lie can damage brand reputation. Second, lying calls more attention to an issue which would have otherwise drifted out of public awareness as the news cycle churns. These depend on how much credibility people assign to the organization and their claims. Reframing #3: "On net, it is in an organization's self-interest to loudly proclaim a falsehood about its quality." Maybe. It depends on many factors. This is the most interesting public policy question! If such a tactic works (see reframing #2 above), it is clearly a negative externality (a downstream effect than an actor does not feel directly). How does wise public policy address externalities? One classic way is to internalize the cost -- by making the actor feel the pain themself. In #3 above, one way to internalize the externality would be to impose some penalty or cost for lying. How to do this in a targeted, effective, non-delayed, and legal way is non-obvious to me. By non-delayed I mean temporally-immediate consequences provide better signal to correct a decision. This isn't just human nature; it is fundamental to the credit-assignment problem in reinforcement learning. The problem of delayed feedback goes deeper than just credit-assignment; it has to do with fairness too. Often, the decision-maker isn't a monolith: the leadership composition changes over time. It may be impractical to punish one cog in the system without imposing a cost on the rest of the system, many of whom had nothing to do with the decision.

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porphyra 2y ago

Tesla aced another independent out-of-sample crash test [1]. The danluu article also mentions an iSeeCars report at the bottom that says that Teslas have a high amount of fatalities per mile driven [2]. However, while they claim to be using official US estimates of fatalities data, they normalized it with estimated mileage using unknown proprietary iSeeCars data: > iSeeCars analyzed fatality data from the U.S. Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS). Only cars from model years 2018-2022 in crashes that resulted in occupant fatalities between 2017 and 2022 (the latest year data was available) were included in the analysis. To adjust for exposure, the number of cars involved in a fatal crash were normalized by the total number of vehicle miles driven, which was estimated from iSeeCars’ data of over 8 million vehicles on the road in 2022 from model years 2018-2022. Heavy-duty trucks and vans, models not in production as of the 2024 model year, and low-volume models were removed from further analysis. Some numbers are also surprising, such as the Model Y having almost twice the fatality rate (10.6 per billion miles) as the Tesla average (5.6) --- suggesting that there's a wide gulf between it and the Model 3 in terms of fatality rates, which seems difficult to explain. Ultimately, iSeeCars is a small VC-funded startup with very few people and so it is unclear if their methodology is actually good or not. For a better blog post about whether Teslas are safe, here's a post from Brandon Paddock [3] from a year ago, which seems more or less objective and unsurprising. Here is the conclusion that he drew upon analyzing the FARS data: > Tesla’s fatal accident rate is nearly identical to that of the Audi A4 series, and far lower than a standard Ford mid-size sedan. In this case, the Ford’s accident rate is more than 4 times higher than the Tesla Model 3. [1] https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-model-3-aces-safety-tests-china-video https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-model-3-aces-safety-tests-ch... [2] https://www.iseecars.com/most-dangerous-cars-study https://www.iseecars.com/most-dangerous-cars-study [3] https://brandonpaddock.substack.com/p/are-teslas-the-most-or-least-safe https://brandonpaddock.substack.com/p/are-teslas-the-most-or...

two_handfuls 2y ago
> Some numbers are also surprising, such as the Model Y having almost twice the fatality rate (10.6 per billion miles) as the Tesla average (5.6) My guess is that is due to higher average occupancy for model Y vs model 3.

ggreer 2y ago

The 2024 update in this post (which claims the worst brands are Tesla, Kia, Buick, Dodge, and then Hyundai, in that order) uses data from an iSeeCars blog post[1], which claims to have gotten their data from the U.S. Fatality Analysis Reporting System[2]. There's one important detail they mention in the blog post: > To adjust for exposure, the number of cars involved in a fatal crash were normalized by the total number of vehicle miles driven, which was estimated from iSeeCars’ data of over 8 million vehicles on the road in 2022 from model years 2018-2022. Note that the mileage data for each model comes from iSeeCars, not FARS. We don't know how accurate it is. There could be selection effects because iSeeCars only gets odometer data for cars that are for sale or have been sold, not vehicles that people keep. If for example, someone reserved a Model Y and sold it above the original price as soon as they got it (a common practice for new Tesla models), and the second owner kept the car indefinitely, iSeeCars would only see the odometer reading at the early sale. Tesla mileage would also skew low in sales data for anyone who bought an electric car, then regretted it for one reason or another, and exchanged it for a gas car. And since the rate they are measuring is fatalities per vehicle mile traveled, not per passenger mile traveled, any model that tends to contain more people will skew higher in the stats. If you query FARS data to get all Teslas involved in occupant fatalities from 2018-2022, there are 141.[3] If you split out the data by model, there were a total of 22 Model Ys involved in occupant fatalities from 2018-2022 (actually 2020-2022, as the Model Y was released in 2020). If there were 10.6 Model Ys involved per billion miles, then (according to iSeeCars) the total number of miles traveled by Model Ys was 2.07 billion. By the end of 2022, the US had approximately 484,100 Model Ys on the road.[4] If you divide the total vehicle miles traveled by the number of vehicles, then the average Model Y had less than 4,300 miles on its odometer. That seems suspiciously low, as Tesla's 2021 report put the average Model Y at 13,000-14,000 miles per year.[5] This artifact in mis-measuring mileage would also explain why other recently released models seem to have high fatality rates. The Honda CRV Hybrid was released in 2020. The Buick Encore GX was released in 2020. US production of the Hyundai Venue didn't ramp up until 2020. The Toyota Corolla Hybrid was released in 2019. Most people who buy a new car either sell it quickly (because they dislike it and want something else), or they keep it until it gets old. So anyone collecting milage data from car sales will have data that is skewed low for new models because the higher mileage sales haven't happened yet. It may be the case that I'm using different reports than iSeeCars did. It's hard to know whether they're looking at vehicles involved in fatal crashes, drivers involved in fatal crashes, drivers killed in fatal crashes, occupants involved in fatal crashes, or occupants killed in fatal crashes. FARS lets you query all of these, and the iSeeCars post doesn't make it clear which data they used. Another odd thing about the iSeeCars data is that they claim an average of 2.8 vehicles involved in a fatal accident for every billion miles traveled. But in 2022, the US had 13.3 deaths per billion miles traveled by car. Unless the average accident involves 5 fatalities, it seems to me that the iSeeCars data has some significant issues. 1. https://www.iseecars.com/most-dangerous-cars-study#v=2024 https://www.iseecars.com/most-dangerous-cars-study#v=2024 2. https://www.nhtsa.gov/research-data/fatality-analysis-reporting-system-fars https://www.nhtsa.gov/research-data/fatality-analysis-report... 3. https://cdan.dot.gov/query https://cdan.dot.gov/query I don't know how long they retain generated reports for, but mine was available at https://cdan.dot.gov/files/files/b14dcfb4-1f45-4eeb-abda-744a1818d03a/content https://cdan.dot.gov/files/files/b14dcfb4-1f45-4eeb-abda-744... when I made this comment. 4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Model_Y#Sales https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Model_Y#Sales states 172,700 sold in 2021 and 231,400 in 2022. Other estimates put around 80,000 sold in 2020, for a total of 484,100. 5. See page 79 of https://www.tesla.com/ns_videos/2021-tesla-impact-report.pdf https://www.tesla.com/ns_videos/2021-tesla-impact-report.pdf

chiph 2y ago

I haven't seen anyone talk about how the fleet of cars on US roads is now older than ever. Approximately 12 years now. That's 12 years of safety engineering improvements that aren't there. I am not advocating for government handouts or another "cash for clunkers" program to get them off the roads. But I think it's something that people should consider when shopping for a used vehicle.

WarOnPrivacy 2y ago
> That's 12 years of safety engineering improvements that aren't there. The last 12 years mostly replaced attention-preserving tactile controls with attention-demanding screens. Coexisting with that decreased ability is a race-to-the bottom where new vehicles kill visibility for everyone else (headlights blind ahead; oversizing erases visibility of every car around). I have never felt less safe on the road. And for the privilege, everyone's insurance rates climb and climb and climb - unreasonably punishing people who don't drive super-expensive-to-repair vehicles.
- chiph 2y ago
  You'll get no argument from me how automobile control system ergonomics have gone to shit. But I was thinking more about passive safety improvements from body structure engineering and auto-braking systems.
- Der_Einzige 2y ago
  You're so full of it and people like you coming and acting like we haven't objectively improved things do not help anyone at all. In the last 12 years we have seen the following: 1. Further proliferation of 360 cameras, blind spot monitors, rear and front cameras, digital rear view mirrors, and even some vehicles with in-dash blind-spot cameras and including them down-market. This directly translates to fewer fatalities, especially of children. 2. Further proliferation of HUDs and including them down-market, including augmented reality HUDs from the germans, allowing drivers to keep their eyes on the road for a larger percentage of the drive. This directly translates to fewer fatalities per mile 3. Better auto-high beam systems, including truly amazing systems from the Germans (to reduce the dazzle issue you brought up above). Also down-market movement of things like auto-turning lights to improve safety of turning at night. 4. Huge improvements in automatic front and rear emergency braking, including for people, cyclists, and children. This is likely the most impactful, and has massively reduced deaths, and minimized the harm of situations that do become harmful. 5. Some cars have automatic evasive turn systems, which occasionally intervene and prevent crashes before they happen similar to 4. 6. Some newer cars have safety stuff like automatic crash based loud noise systems (prepare ears for crash), automatic crash based seat belt pre-tension systems and similar systems to mitigate crash damage. Onstar automatically calls emergency services regardless if you pay and speeds up ambulance and thus life-saving care. 7. Carplay/Android Auto means less time fumbling with deciding where to go. Huge amounts of distraction caused by shit infotainment systems. So done with people acting like driving is worse because we took 1 or 2 steps back for every 7 we take forward. Ludditism is the human death drive externalized in a lesser form.

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avar 2y ago

An excellent overview, one thing I'd like to take issue with is this: We can also observe that, in the IIHS analysis, many factors that one might want to control for aren't [...] One way to see that the numbers are heavily influenced by confounding factors is by looking at AWD or 4WD vs. 2WD versions of cars. They often have wildly different fatalty rates even though the safety differences are not very large (and the difference is often in favor of the 2WD vehicle). Some plausible causes of that are random noise, differences in who buys different versions of the same vehicle, and differences in how the vehicle are used. I have no idea why that is either, but the author is surprising confident in declaring AWD a confounding variable, especially after the earlier "Actual vehicle tested may be different" point they made. A typical AWD will have a transfer case, front driveshaft and other front drivetrain components v.s. a sister car in a 2WD configuration. The overall weight and distribution will be different. One might e.g. suspect that in a crash the front driveshaft might fold upwards and assist in structurally compromising the passenger cabin.