Tesla Has Highest Rate of Deadly Accidents Among Car Brands, Study Finds
Tesla Has Highest Rate of Deadly Accidents Among Car Brands, Study Finds
Automotive research firm finds that Tesla has higher frequency of deadly accidents than any other car brand
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.
Two Tesla owners got so mad…
Two Tesla owners walk into a bar. One stops in the middle on the way to the aeat and the other one drives right into a fire truck
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
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.
It's called regen braking and puts energy back into battery. You can also control how strong the regen is in settings.
I prefer strong regen and hold mode. The car will slow as soon as you release the accelerator pedal. Hold mode basically means the car stays put when it's stopped until you press the accelerater. Creep mode would have the car roll forward when you release the brake.
The one pedal driving works really well but there is a small learning curve. I would find it a bit annoying to switch back and forth like the valet guy.
Yeah and I HATE it. I drove my cousins Tesla when it first came out, way before musk started publicly acting like the douchebro he is and before there was really a Tesla fanboy club with a bunch of wannabes slobbing musks knob online.
I think I drove it in the neighborhood for like five minutes, stopped and parked the car and asked my cousin to drive it back. Hating it is an understatement.
Last year all the valets and I agreed we won’t be parking Tesla’s because of how much we hate them, but management overruled us this year.
I’ve been driving for 20 years. I shouldn’t need a lesson from a Tesla owner on how to drive their car. The fact that I do shows how fucking dangerous they are. They’re not designed by people who drive and it’s so fucking obvious that the computer nerds who design them get chauffeured everywhere by Ubers.
Any decent car in the tesla price bracket has configurable regen from all the way off to progressively more regen all thr way up to one pedal driving that will apply the brakes for you to come to a complete stop without touching thr pedal.
Vast majority of these it's switched between the modes using the paddle shift. If you can understand changing gears on a modern ice auto using the paddles, then it's not beyond the average driver to quickly get to grips with using it for regen.
I'd you feather the throttle as you start to slow down you can moderate the amount of regen dynamically without having to change modes. However that requires more skill than the average driver seem capable of.
Cheaper evs tend to have off, on, and may be one pedal driving modes, but they have to cut things to be cheaper as with all cars.
I get between a fifth and a quarter back of my energy consumption from using regen. Learning how to use it is essential for good economy, and it makes you safer as you plan ahead more for where you want to slow down. The least safest way to drive is emergency braking 10m before a stop sign as your default driving style
Regen breaking. My guess they can't bake it into the brake pedal because some rules for what a break pedal is allowed to do or just bad design. Both very possible.
If you wanna coast just use cruise control. Otherwise you have to keep the "gas" slightly pressed to maintain speed. It's way better but the very real downside is that you forget how to drive ice cars.
People always clown on BMW drivers, Tessholes are the absolute worst.
Teslas replaced bmw for sure, now I'm just like "sure they are dicks but at least they can drive" while teslas are mostly dicks who don't know how to drive.
They were bad before teslas existed! Benz drivers too
B-but it looks so sleek and clean! Who cares about safety!
Does it? Looks outdated to me.
My Nissan Leaf has the one pedal regenerative braking and I prefer it because you are not wearing down your brake pads and rotors. Thankfully, Nissan continues to use buttons and not a bloody touch screen. I agree with you on that point.
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.
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.
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 intuitive unintuitive 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
As an ev driver, some people shouldn't be allowed this much acceleration 0-60 time, me included.
I've got a "shitbox" VW Golf - the twin charger version, it's only around 118kw. It's not quick by any stretch of the imagination even with the bolt-on mods mine has so far.
I'd not like to imagine the levels of trouble I'd find myself in owning even a midrange EV. Being able to give an EV a ham sandwich and hit 100kph in ~5 seconds or less is absurd.
Not to mention the weight. Those premium vehicles with long range stats are very heavy. That's what makes them so terrifying to me.
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/
Florida drivers are the worst.
It's a Good Thing their Boss Elon Musk isn't in Charge of Vehicle Oversight now! That would be REALLY Corrupt!
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.
Yeah the Rolling Stone article is written really weirdly. I don't think it's technically wrong anywhere but it reads really misleadingly when you compare it to the actual report.
Like it leads with "the group identified the Tesla Model S and Tesla Model Y as two of the most dangerous cars" - meaning they are in the list - at sixth and twenty first places respectively. The mix is really weird though. As you mention the top of the list is cars like the Chevy Corvette and Porsche 911, but also things like the Mitsubishi Mirage and a load of Kia models. So it seems like there's a lot to interpret there.
Certainly it's somewhat damning that despite the driver assistant technology, these models are not particularly safer. But I think other manufactures have a wide range of vehicles at different price points that also vary in safety, which brings their averages below Tesla's in the final rankings.
Thank you for linking to the actual report. It makes a lot more sense. Since they're basing it on occupant fatalities it makes sense that smaller cars are deadlier, since they'll suffer more damage in an accident. It's also interesting that the small SUVs are more deadly, which I attribute to the low mass and high CoG leading to more frequent rollovers.
As a note, it looks like the data they used is publicly available from the NHTSA. They mention that "models not in production as of the 2024 model year, and low-volume models were removed from further analysis." I wonder where the Hummer and Rivian show up there since they are not mentioned in the report whatsoever.
ease up on the mo powah baby
But... but... more power better.
But the article seems to be about deadly accidents, and not just accidents.
You can hit an awful lot of things at a shocking rate of speed and walk away with modern car crash design, so I'd be inclined to think it's more than just the torque curve responsible for all the dead people.
I'm all for mo powah baby, but only for people who can handle it. Grandma driving to the store shouldn't be able to get their car to act like a Mustang leaving a car meet.
Plus electric cars are a ton heavier which means way more kinetic energy which can cause worse accidents, negating some of the crash safety improvements, especially in smaller cars.
It's 100% FSD....
A human driver will almost always realize they're actively having an accident, and will be slamming breaks and attempting to swearve.
FSD not noticing something and driving straight into it won't react itll just act like what it's about to hit isn't there right up until the collusion.
A second of brakes before an interstate accident and human drivers instinct to protect their side of the car goes a long way to saving lives.
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...?
If there's too much power the car will start driving you. Just like how Mustang drivers leaving car meets frequently get themselves in trouble by not being able to control the power they've got.
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
Model S... you’ll be really surprised what happens if you floor it
Honestly, I've almost never seen anyone in a Tesla floor it. Yeah, maybe once or twice when they first get it, but most dual motor Teslas I see drive pretty conservatively, probably because they want better mileage per charge or something.
So we will see some insane stuff from Elox to take the spotlight from this or meh?
Elon: “We’re number one!!!”
<jumps, exposing midriff>
Agustus Gloop lookin mf
I'm having a hard time understanding this article. They say the Teslas have the highest rating of deadly accidents, but then go on to say Tesla ranked #6 on the list of fatalities, then once again stated Tesla was the worst. So what happened to the other five vehicles that had a higher fatality rating?
Go to the actual report. There is one table for the top fatalities by vehicle model and another for the top average fatalities by manufacturer.
The way I understood it is the highest rate of deadly accidents refers to "5.6 fatal accidents per billion miles traveled" by the brand overall. The number 6 rating refers to the Model S specifically.
Ah thank you, that DOES make more sense.
Another way to interpret this is that other brands have vehicles that are far safer than thei unsafest model, while any Tesla model is unsafe.
They don't get clicks.
Or, their manufacturers also make some safer vehicles. It seems that all of Tesla's vehicles are high up the list, so the whole manufacturer average is higher than all others. Wheras Hyundai, for example, must sell plenty of safer models that bring down its average.
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
Yep, his battery factory in Germany got into lots of PR trouble for poisoning ground water and having a three times higher rate of work related accidents then is normal.
Obviously the fault of too many studies. /s
Oh study finds huh, who'da thunk.
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 don’t think it needs to perfect, but without seeing the data I can’t trust it. ie one of the way the results can rigged is to set lower kilometers travel for some models.
e.v. drive weird.
Because they are very different machines on the same road :
in internal combustion engine vehicle, going downhill : let's accelerate a (little?) bit !
The electric car driver :
(slowing down) let's charge the battery !
There are approximately 250 million cars on the road and they only used data from 8 million? That's 3% of cars on the road to extrapolate into all the cars on the road. Seems like a huge flaw especially since we didn't know how they got that subset. All seems like click bait as most articles related to Tesla are...
Another good way / better way to see what cars are dangerous are insurance rates. Since insurance companies take in way more data than 8M cars when determining rates.
That's more than 3% of the user base. 0.5% is considered sufficient for statistical relevance.
A sample of 8 million cars is more than enough to be representative.
.... sufficiently random ...
Since they just use the 8m for the normalisation it'd be interesting to know how sensitive the rankings are if they assumed some bias. Or maybe even just swap around some normalisation factors and see how robust the ranking is.
I guess they do have near complete data on the deaths, and pretty good data on the population of registered vehicles.
Found the Tesla driver
Just honestly asking Im not a statistician. From a lay person looking high level this seems weird. The conclusion also does not match up with insurance prices that I've personally seen nor correspond with my experience.
I'm here for discussion not trying to put anyone down. Could someone just explain to me what I'm missing. No need to downvote. So if you take a non random sample of data how can you extrapolate that out so much? Does this data line up with other people's data? What am I missing?
Tesla's do cost more to insure than 'average' cars. But, that extra cost reflects more the cost to repair minor/moderate damage than cost of fatalities. Since fatalities are just a smaller subset accidents. Tesla's are extremely costly to repair and often get totaled vs repaired. Premiums reflect that cost of loss.
3% of 250 million could very well be the approximate number of cars on the roads that are involved in a fatal collision. And that is the only consideration of the article in this study.
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:
That was going to be my suggestion.
More irresponsible than Nissan Altima or Dodge Ram owners isn't easy
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.
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?
Or, hear me out, maybe they are just shit because so many corners have been cut in manufacturing that tesla cars should be perfect spheres by now.
This is my first thought. Anecdotally Tesla drivers joins the ranks of Audi and BMW of insane drivers around me.
Eh, I've seen the opposite. Most of the Tesla drivers in my area seem to drive relatively slowly. Yes, Teslas can go fast, but that burns through range like crazy, so I think a lot of them want that better range.
BMW drivers here are the worst because act completely entitled. They'll cross multiple lanes on the highway w/o signaling, aggressively pass on the right just to slow down to the speed of traffic again, and they'll park across multiple parking stalls. Audis are similar, but the demographics seem to skew a bit older.
Here are the main demographics I tend to see in my area (Utah):
The first three drive super aggressively, the fourth can vary, the fifth drives pretty normal, and the last tend to drive pretty conservatively. At least that's my read from my area.
They're a cross between BMW drivers and incapable Prius drivers from the oast when they were the first hybrids.
Aka, you have the douches driving like entitled dicks because of the speed and prestige of the brand, and then you have the eco focused clueless drivers putting around.
I tend to keep a wary eye on all teslas because either way, they're unpredictable.
I think of tesla drivers like BMW drivers who aren't good with their money.
"A vehicle’s size, weight, and height certainly play a part in its ability to protect passengers in a crash,” said Brauer. “But the biggest contributor to occupant safety is avoiding a crash, and the biggest factor in crash avoidance is driver behavior. A focused, alert driver, traveling at a legal or prudent speed, without being under the influence of drugs or alcohol, is the most likely to arrive safely regardless of the vehicle they’re driving.”
This is my hunch too. Perhaps the UI is more distracting with Tesla's implementation of screens/menus/feedback for car functions too.
Just pointing out the study emphasize occupant fatalities which I take as to exclude external fatalities such as other vehicles.
Oh yeah, the big infotainment system could definitely be a factor in bad driving.
Also thanks for pointing out the methodology on how they’re counting fatalities, that easily scratches one item off my list.
My bet is on the extra torque being the primary problem. Rental companies have complained about increased incident rates, and they're probably not renting out Teslas.
Hertz has had Tesla's most of the time I've picked up a rental
Last time I looked up publicly available crash statistics in the US, Tesla was like 1/80th the typical per capita crashes of the average auto maker. I doubt that's changed without some sketchy statistic interpretations.
they used crash statistics for new cars with models from 2018 to 2022, where tesla is the most dangerous brand
They looked at fatal crashes only, which is presumably a very small share of all crashes. They also normalised to per mile driven using a sample of data they have - presumably some data on miles driven by car type.
Could be sketchy, could just be a much smaller sub-population.
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:
I expect (hope) it's a small factor, but I wonder where pedestrian fatalities fit in. Several of the worst models seem to be large SUVs or sports cars - alongside these Teslas and some rather cheaper compact cars.
Pedestrians were not part of this study.
Large SUVs must be worse for pedestrians because they’re essentially tanks that you can’t see out in front of for a good 20’ or so. A small child running to get their ball in the road will be completely invisible to a large SUV whereas a Tesla driver would be able to see the child a lot sooner and hopefully avoid them.
Re bullet 2. Irresponsibility.
My theory is that it is isn’t the badge on the car, it’s the fact that people’s grocery getter now was the performance of a high-end sports car from a decade ago. And, like a with a sports car, Teslas are designed to encourage users to have “fun” driving. Every test drive from a Tesla store ALWAYS includes a segment where the store rep encourages people gun it onto or on a large open road.
Before Telsa it was the German manufacturers who dominated the commuter-car-with-sports-car-performance market. And guess what? Those people drove like a-holes.
That is not true. I mean the bit where you put that into the past tense. They still do.