[enoch_r]

> It’s funny because the Ford Pinto is thought of as an example of an unreliable death trap but the deaths from Tesla’s poor craftsmanship and design heavily outweigh the Pinto by a wide margin.

What are the stats you're referencing here? I find this difficult to believe, as modern cars are generally much safer than cars from the 1970s and Teslas seem to perform well in crash tests. They'd need to be incredibly dangerous relative to other modern cars to be as dangerous as a typical car from the 1970s.

[ceejayoz]

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/02/report-cybertru...

> An analysis published Thursday by the auto news website FuelArc found that, in their one year of existence, the approximately 34,000 Cybertrucks on the roads had five fire fatalities, giving them a fatality rate of 14.5 per 100,000 units. That’s 17 times the fatality rate of the Ford Pintos, whose famously flawed gas tank design on the car’s rear end led to 27 reported fire fatalities in its nine years on the road, resulting in a fatality rate of 0.85 per 100,000 units, according to FuelArc.

[enoch_r]

This is really, really bad.

The Ford Pinto number is the total number of deaths that the NHTSA found to have occurred between 1970 and mid-1977 (so not the full 9-year period) in rear-impact crashes that resulted in a fire.

This is not comparable to the total number of fatalities involving fire and a Cybertruck (regardless of the impact type, or lack thereof, e.g. the Las Vegas fatality was due to the guy shooting himself in the head). Not a single one of the three Cybertruck incidents would have been included in the Ford Pinto statistic because none of them were rear-impact crashes that resulted in a fire.

According to the Wikipedia article about the Pinto:

> At the time only 1% of automobile crashes would result in fire and only 4% of fatal accidents involved fire, and only 15% of fatal fire crashes are the result of rear-end collisions.

So we'd expect the total fire fatality rate to be about 6.5x the fatality rate specific to rear-end collisions that resulted in fire.

And of course, saying "Teslas are more dangerous than Ford Pintos" is very different than saying "the Tesla Cybertruck has a higher rate of fire fatalities than the Ford Pinto." Even the latter statement would be incorrect but the former is simply absurd.

[reitzensteinm]

You're extrapolating Pinto rear end collision fire deaths to overall collision fire deaths using the standard ratios of the time.

But the Pinto was prone to rear end collisions causing fires. So the correct ratio is unknown, and presumably wouldn't be close to 15%.

I agree in general that the linked article is junk.

[rsynnott]

There probably aren't enough of these in the wild to have very much confidence, mind you.

[alamortsubite]

A single Cybertruck weighs as much as three Ford Pintos. We should be sure to include Newton's second law in our evaluations of which is the more dangerous vehicle.