Right but he's equating "Acceptable" to worse than "Poor" as the German cars were achieving in the same time frame. The Tesla was "Acceptable" for years where the German cars were "Poor". Which is worse?
Also he's attributing poor passenger side tests to malice when the real reason might be that the engineering requirements are very different because the steering column doesn't exist on the passenger side.
Sure, there probably should be a category between 3 and 4 for Tesla: mediocre before and after. I’d prefer a car that is now safer over one that has always been mediocre, but that’s just me.
Right but he's punishing Tesla for scoring "Acceptable" for years on the test when they scored "Excellent" on the other tests.
And he's somehow rewarding M-B and BMW when they scored "Unacceptable" or "Poor" on the same tests for years when scoring "Excellent" on the other tests. Scoring Unacceptable/Marginal/Poor on a test when scoring Excellent on others is much more evidential that the car was specifically designed only to game the test standard.
It took Tesla longer to upgrade the car from "Acceptable" to "Excellent" on the new tests than it took BMW/Mercedes to upgrade their cars from "Poor" to "Excellent" on the tests, but that still means M-B and BMW put hundreds of thousands of cars with Poor crash performance on the road for years while Tesla was putting cars on the road with "Acceptable" performance in the same test. Somehow that makes Tesla worse in his rating system.
Also he's attributing poor passenger side tests to malice when the real reason might be that the engineering requirements are very different because the steering column doesn't exist on the passenger side.