Automotive research firm finds that Tesla has higher frequency of deadly accidents than any other car brand
I work as a valet driver and the Tesla - unlike any other car including the newer EVs from other brands - seems like it was designed by people who have never driven a car. Ever.
Call me crazy but having nearly all the controls in a stupid idiotic touch screen where you have to scroll through multiple menus for basic car settings is a terrible idea. And so is braking by letting off the gas.
And the people who buy them tend to be a certain kind of person… not the brightest
I rode a Tesla Uber once and the guy clearly didn’t know how to drive it because we were lurching forward and backward while just going down a straight road. We got carsick.
That sounds like he doesn’t understand how to use one pedal driving.
The touch screen is an interface-design antipattern. It causes worse driver distraction than a phone, since experienced users can often interact with simple phone apps without looking. They should be banned, and Tesla (and all carmakers) should be forced to retrofit car controls that are proven safe by third-party testers.
But instead, we have Trump, so next year’s Teslas will have automomous chainsaw-bots prowling the car’s cabin.
And so is braking by letting off the gas.
First thing I disabled when I was lent a model Y by a friend. Second thing was any kind of self-drive.
I think it’s a huge factor in the increase in traffic deaths. That, inexperienced new / rusty drivers after covid, covid fucking with peoples brains, bigger heavier faster vehicles, increased day to day life stress.
Braking by letting off the gas? So you can’t coast, it’s either go or stop?
Lot of assumptions in this thread about how terrible one pedal driving must be. No, you can just set the car to coast like normal if you want. There’s still a brake pedal of you need to slam the brakes. One pedal driving takes maybe an hour to get used to, but once you learn it you won’t want to go back. There’s a level of regen that can be adjusted, and you quickly learn how fast that is. I generally have my foot set at a certain level to maintain a speed and if I need to stop at some lights I’ve gotten very used to when I need to lift my foot up for the regen to stop me at the right spot.
No way bro, single pedal driving is amazing. There’s also voice commands and you can hotkey stuff to the left scroll wheel (I use it for toggling chill/performance mode), and you can put it in autopilot if you really gotta use the touchscreen - but how often do you need to do something not covered by voice commands steering buttons?
No way bro, single pedal driving is amazing.
What’s amazing about it? Seems
intuitiveunintuitive as hell but I’ve never actually experienced it personally. How do you control how fast you stop or just coast? What if the electronics fail? My car the brakes are mechanically connected to the pedal, if the power brakes go out I can still brake without them (although it is much more difficult).edit: that was supposed to say UNintuitive
I have a Mach-E and drive exclusively in one pedal mode. With my car you can still use the brake if you want. But honestly once you adjust to it, it becomes very instinctive to let it accelerate and decelerate based on the traffic patterns around you.
Now, if someone’s doing some stupid shit in Seattle during rush hour traffic I end up using the brake more but for 95% of my daily driving I’m just using the one pedal.
It’s honestly more jarring going back to driving my truck with a traditional setup than it was adjusting to the one pedal setup.
Like a lot of things about cars today (your bright-ass lights, size making it impossible to see around you, that fucking beeping) this is annoying for those around you because the brake lights don’t go on your car just suddenly decelerates.
If you’re reading the brake lights on the car directly in front of you as an indicator to slow down, you have already lost the plot.
A competent driver is actively driving a minimum of half a mile ahead of themselves with more than adequate distance between the vehicle directly in front of them to allow a response to changing road conditions.
The car doesn’t suddenly decelerate unless the driver completely pulls their foot from the pedal. This sounds like a skill issue on both sides.
Your speed is directly tied to how hard you’re pressing the accelerator. You don’t have to guess momentum. If you fully let go the the accelerator, your rate of deceleration is tied to how much you can regen. If the battery is too full, the regen brakes can’t absorb as much (the metaphor I like is imagining a full piece of luggage, it’s hard to jam it from 90 to 100% full) - so instead of slowing the car down and not being able to absorb the energy, it’ll just not slow down as much so it doesn’t give waste energy - - this is actually pretty dangerous, so now there is a setting so that in situations like this, the car will use the real brakes so that you have a consistent maximum deceleration when letting go of the accelerator.
If the computer crashes the screen goes black so you lose the speedometer. It even rarer now and reboots quickly but obviously if you have a first time passenger they’re gonna freak out. The car still has a normal brake, you just never use it since you wanna max the regen. If you use the real brakes, and browse the energy consumption screen it’ll let you know how much battery you’ve wasted by not using regen and, if you have the safety score enabled you will probably get shit on for driving unsafely (if you need to use the real brake this means you are exceeding the capacity of the regen brake so yeah you’re doing something erratic) - in California, this safety score cannot be used against you for insurance rates.
Only the cyber truck is full drive by wire. Idk the extent of it but there should be “mechanical connections” in the other cars. There’s also a mechanical door handle that damages the trim if you use it (tell your passengers how to properly open/close doors)
Don’t test drive unless you have the money to buy, lol. I already kinda knew I was gonna get one (I had just gotten hit by a drunk driver and used it as a catalyst to upgrade since I really wanted the FSD), but I was sold on the instant torque and the one pedal driving. You just envision yourself wanting to pass someone on the freeway, and the other dude doesn’t stand a chance. It’s awesome.
Don’t test drive unless you have the money to buy, lol.
Don’t worry I would never do anything to intentionally give Elon Musk money.
He already has infinite money. Don’t let that stop you from getting the car if you want the car.
Nah, I want a car with the bare minimum of electronic shit to break. If I could just buy a new copy of my 2012 civic I would do that. I can fix just about anything on that car myself and it’s not phoning home to tell the manufacturer and who knows who else my personal info.
Makes sense to me, most people who own them seem to drive like jackasses.
My partner and I joke that they’re the BMWs of electric vehicles. I once saw a 1-star review on an Electrify America station by a Tesla driver who was freaking out about the station not being compatible with their car and whining about how it should be because Teslas are the most common EVs on the road and how they’re never going to patronize Electrify America again. Meanwhile, there’s a Tesla charging station just a few blocks away that has at least a dozen available spots whereas the Electrify America stations only have four.
I’ve never heard of electrify America
Our university campus and a couple of hotels have Tesla Chargers set up
They think the self driving feature is always on.
To be fair most of them are in California and Californians are the worst drivers in the country.
To be fair, California is not even close to having the worst drivers.
https://www.forbes.com/advisor/car-insurance/worst-drivers-by-state/
Different definitions of worse. Texas is basically one giant DUI, so… Yeah, worse. But also when sober they’ll drive circles around the average California driver.
Florida drivers are the worst.
You think they’re bad, wait until you experience {myCity} drivers!
Only if you’re a bad driver yourself.
It’s a Good Thing their Boss Elon Musk isn’t in Charge of Vehicle Oversight now! That would be REALLY Corrupt!
i hadn’t ever thought about how the headlights having space between themselves on cars really helped judge how far a vehicle was and how fast it is moving toward me.
that is nigh impossible to judge with the teslas with the unibrow lights when moving in the dark.
New VW vehicles also have this. Seems to be the new thing
Mercedes does that too with all their new electric buttplug shaped cars
But all they did was market their pretty good lane-assist and automated braking as a magic butler that lets you nap in the driver’s seat.
How could this happen??
It really shouldn’t be legal to call it “full self driving” unless you can take a nap in the back seat.
It shouldn’t be called “full self driving” unless the company is going to cover the collision part of my insurance.
Which is odd, because most electric vehicles (including some models of the Tesla) have better crash ratings due to having a crumple zone where the engine would be. Assuming that’s still true, there must be another factor that tips the balance towards deadly accidents. Some thoughts:
- They are heavy cars. Maybe it’s safer for the passengers but more deadly for the other vehicle.
- Maybe Tesla drivers are more irresponsible than other car owners.
- Maybe the torque and acceleration is too high, causing people to lose control more often.
- Maybe something that doesn’t get rated in the crash ratings causes deaths, eg. electric locks which are unable to open when power is lost, a likely scenario during collisions.
- Maybe the FSD features are causing more collisions to happen.
Maybe Tesla drivers are more irresponsible than other car owners.
That was going to be my suggestion.
If there’s a systemic reason Tesla drivers have more accidents in a Tesla than drivers of other cars, that car is inherently less safe.
You can’t simply put it down to “Tesla drivers suck”, that’s irresponsible and flawed logic.If it’s the acceleration, maybe we shouldn’t have cars that accelerate the way a Tesla can. But I very much doubt that is the reason except anecdotally. I suspect more that safety features may in fact serve to distract, or people “learn” to rely on them, and than they turn out to not be 100% reliable.
We’ve all heard the weird tendency of Tesla breaking for no reason, that is hazard, also the turn signals are placed wrong, causing them to be impractical in some situations like roundabouts. Also the instrumentation in general of a Tesla is centered very much around the touch screen, another source of potential distraction. AFAIK even the speedometer isn’t placed where it should be to observe it quickly without looking away from the road for too long.
A lot of inherent safety feature in traditional cars, have been shaved away in Tesla cars. Even getting out in an emergency can be a problem, as the handles may fail because they are electric, and the “real” handles are hidden.
There a dozens of examples where Tesla is designed for less safety than traditional cars, and if (when) the safety features fail, I bet they are a lot less safe than if those features weren’t there to begin with.
Tesla cars are designed with a VERY strong focus on reducing production cost, Elon Musk is even boasting about it, and how he has an uncompromising goal to simplify production. But Tesla also lack the experience about why things are like they are in traditional cars.
The systemic reason might just simply be “They were the kind of a person that would buy a Tesla”.
If I wanted to buy a safe car to drive responsibly while respecting all the traffic rules, an EV with almost a thousand horses with a 0-60 time of 2.1-2.4 seconds wouldn’t exactly be my first choice.If you want a more environmentally friendly car, which would you prefer: A Tesla or a Prius?
A lot of Tesla cars were sold when there were very few to no alternatives if you wanted an EV.
Also 2.1-2.4 is not normal for a Tesla. That’s the very fastest of them.Neither. Consumption isn’t environmentally friendly, it’s liberal greenwashing from leaders who think we can continue to consume infinite resources on a finite planet.
That’s bullshit. EU has halved pollution and energy consumption since 1985, don’t tell me it doesn’t make a difference to work towards sustainability.
The raw materials don’t grow on trees and aren’t renewable. EVs are a fantasy solution that doesn’t actually solve the problem. The batteries are full of rare earth metals and toxic as fuck.
The problem is consumption itself, but rich Europeans such as yourself pat yourself on the back for being so virtuous when really all you’re doing is replacing one kind of pollution (dead dinosaurs) for another (rare earth metals).
And as we’ve seen with environmental regulations for shipping, now that the ships burn cleaner fuel there’s less pollution, which means less particles for sunlight to reflect off of in the air leading to faster global warming. An unexpected negative side effect of reducing pollution.
Then there’s the freedom issues with EVs. They’re expensive as hell, you can’t work on them yourself or with an independent mechanic, and they can get bricked remotely whether by bad software update, because you missed your payment that month, or a cyber attack. Sorry but if they can brick my $500 phone with a software update there’s no way in fucking hell im allowing these tech companies access to a $25k car. The capitalists will find a way for planned obsolescence so this way the line forever goes up.
Fuck that I’ll take the ICE with minimal computer bullshit in it everyday. My 2013 Subaru Impreza with 230k miles on it is more environmentally friendly than buying some stupid new EV for $50k that I don’t have. Keeping an efficient ICE car on the road for as long as it will drive is more efficient than trading it in for any EV. Raw materials don’t grow on trees.
100 companies produce 70% of the worlds pollution (not including the US military which is the largest single polluter in the world) fuck this EV and no plastic straws or bags bullshit. It’s not on individuals. Capitalism itself needs to be fucking overthrown if we have any chance of stopping climate change. And it’s already likely too late - the time to overthrow was in the 90s and people tried. A whole lot of leftist groups in the US got thrown life in prison as “terrorists” for it. ELF and ALF.
More irresponsible than Nissan Altima or Dodge Ram owners isn’t easy
Most deadly to driver is not the same thing as most deadly. SUVs are usually extremely deadly to pedestrians and other road users.
As an SUV driver in Appalachia, I’ve mostly only injured pedestrians.
Anecdotal, I know. I’ve only killed 2 people. What’s the average?
Now I won’t sleep for fear of jinxing myself.
Being human is stupid.
Last time I looked up publicly available crash statistics in the US and calculated the per-maker numbers, Tesla was like 1/80th the typical per capita crashes of the average auto maker. That was a few years back, but I doubt that’s changed without some sketchy statistic interpretations.
Obligatory preface written after comment was written:
I am in no way a statistician or data analysis guru. I admit I could be looking at this shit entirely wrong and welcome anybody who corrects anything I I’m looking at incorrectly.
Actual comment:
The entire report itself is skewed as fuck before Rolling Stone cherry picked the fuck out of it for the article to slam Tesla. Listen I’m as sick of Elon as the next but these fucking shit on everything Elon hiveminds are so much more fucking obnoxious. Theyre always 10 to 1 comments by people who didnt read the article to comments by people who did.
At the end is the actual image from the site that issued the report. I didnt bother with a source link because it’s right in the article OP posted.
Issues with the article and report:
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The figures are not for every car on the road it only covers cars made between 2018 and 2022. Not a big deal but still deceiving as fuck to theme the article as Tesla has one of the highest death rates. Cuz they left the time frame out of the RS article. Kinda how they left out the fact that only 1 tesla is in the top 6 and the other Tesla is second to last with a flood of much larger much more common vehicle names that fill in between 1 and 23.
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Each rate is calculated off 1 billion miles driven per year. When you put any Tesla model up next to any Ford, Honda, GM, Toyota, etc the % of all teslas on the road are going to be ridiculously higher than the % of the other much larger industry makes and models on the road that it takes to reach 1 billion miles. Because idk if I explained that well here is a made up scenario to illustrate it. Let’s say there are 1000 teslas on the road compared to 1,000,000 Prius on the road. The tesla death rates are based out of 1000 Teslas driving 1,000,000 miles each. Whereas the Prius death rates are based off 1,000,000 Prius’ driving 1,000 miles each.
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Remember point 2 as it plays into point 3. The method they used to calculate the rate outlined in point 2, I believe is normal when govt is figuring out vehicle death rates by category, location, driver age, etc. However the study they reference is specifically for death rates per vehicle make. Which makes the methods used for calculating deathrate by make and model completely fucked. They should’ve done the same number of cars per each make and model type as well as the same miles driven to get a comparable outcome of death rates per make amd model over 4 year span.
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When this was posted last week, I mentioned that it was odd that all the most deadliest models on the list were all low production cars, meaning there might be something wonky with their methodology.
There was a similar “study” done a year or so ago where they simply looked at car insurance applications and used people’s accident history and whatever vehicle they were trying to insure at the time to generate a list of which models had the “most accidents” in an incredibly flawed manor (Pontiac and Oldsmobile were among the safest even though neither company exists anymore).
The study said they normalize by mileage, which will account for both model popularity and driving distance. Driving safety is usually reported in incidents per mile or something to that effect, so that’s all standard.
The data is by “Fatal Accident Rate (Cars per Billion Vehicle Miles)”, Model Y having 10.6, Model S having 5.8. Ignoring Model 3, the average would be 8.2. Back in 2023 Tesla tweeted “Total miles driven by the Tesla fleet has exceeded 100 billion miles globally—equal to 532 round trips to the sun!”
So that math says 820 fatal accidents, Tesladeaths reports 614. I’d say the numbers seem close enough?
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.
Gived the number are estimated, how can we trust them?
iSeeCars’ data of over 8 million vehicles on the road in 2022
It uses actual data to get a baseline of brand percentages then expands that to the total vehicles on the road total
Its not going to be a perfect estimate, but it’s going to be close enough to avoid major errors unless something weird happened with the initial data (like not being diverse enough, but with 8 million cars that’s unlikely)
I wonder if they have the data broken down by propulsion technology rather than manufacturer. One thing about Teslas and other luxury electric cars is that they have insane amounts of horsepower and instant torque. If you buy a Model S to schlep the kids around and are expecting it to behave like a minivan you’ll be really surprised what happens if you floor it.
I’m curious to know if this trend is the same for other high-powered electric cars like the Hummer or Rivian. Cars that go that fast used to be limited to supercars, not large and widespread SUVs and pickups.
(Note this is not saying electric is bad or we shouldn’t use it. But maybe manufacturers could ease up on the mo powah baby.)
But I also agree with the article that it could be related to their claims of “full self driving” because people might trust it too much and just not pay attention, or have it fail to detect something.
they have insane amounts of horsepower and instant torque
No, no. The car is not driving you. You are driving the car. It must do what you want.
If you let the car drive you, then no wonder you are dead quite soon. So, maybe these numbers are indeed telling something about Tesla drivers…?
No, no. The car is not driving you. You are driving the car. It must do what you want.
you have to understand how to tell the car what you want, and that’s the issue at hand
People who’ve been driving has cars for 10+ years are going to have a harder time adjusting to the way an EV drives. Subconsciously it’s easy to forget the differences in throttle response and how coasting works, every time I have to drive a gas car it feels like I’m driving in molasses
Even skilled drivers have trouble adapting at first because of how different it is. Luckily my car has a mode where it drives more like a gas car so the wife and I used that for a while to adjust to driving it, now I almost never use that mode, but if I leave it off and someone ELSE drives my car theyre likely to burn out my tires a bit even if I warm them, there’s that much more torque
