[ajross]

> make Teslas more likely to crash than other vehicles

Citation needed. Which other vehicles? Tesla's overall safety record is quite good. Every car has things it does well and things it does badly, and every other manufacturer gets judged on the safety record on balance.

I mean, do you regularly post on HN about, I dunno, Toyota's safety record given the high center of gravity of its SUV offerings that make them "more likely to roll over than other vehicles" and claim that "crash safety features take a back page" to that problem?

[m463]

Well, teslas ARE more likely to crash than commercial airliners, because "everyone knows you are more likely to die driving to the airport than in the plane"

Other than that, tesla does publish some data:

https://www.tesla.com/VehicleSafetyReport

That said, people commonly constrain the Tesla comparisons to newer cars or in some other way.

[sliken]

See wikipedia's "aviation_safety" page. Avaiation is clearly safer per mile (a factor of 60 or so), but not that much safer per hour (factor of 4 per so), but is 3 times more dangerous per journey.

So driving to the airport might well be safer than flying across the country according to the journey metric. Even using the hour metric I often am less than an hour from the airport and take more than a 4 hour flight.

[gamblor956]

Last I checked, Toyota's cars don't roll themselves over. The driver of the SUV needs to be going too fast and take a turn too sharply to cause a rollover. Indeed, Tesla Model Ys, and all SUVs, are also prone to rollover due to having a higher center of mass than a sedan. This is why anti-rollover features are now standard in SUVs: to minimize the likelihood of a rollover occuring, and then to mitigate the harm to the occupants of the vehicle in the event of a rollover.

In contrast, Teslas literally drive themselves into trucks, stopped cars, highway dividers, etc., resulting in the deaths of 7 drivers so far in a base of only a few hundred thousand vehicles, versus a rest-of-the-industry statistic of 0 across hundreds of millions of cars.

And finally, Toyota doesn't go around bragging about how its vehicles are the safest cars ever, or misstating (or even outright lying) about IIHS or NHTSA safety tests.

[Retric]

If you mean 0 deaths per 0 miles vs 7 deaths per 1+ Billion miles that’s hardly impressive.

PS: Oddly enough of you replaced those billion miles with average American miles in average cars you would expect 12.5 deaths. Tesla’s autopilot might be less safe than other new cars in their segment especially if driven defensively etc, but that’s harder to quantify.